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@sasorikigai gets a random starter! linked to these asks/verse (x) (x)

"Sorry, darlin'. I have to make a withdraw."

Her performance has ended. Stationed in another city, the same place on Decatur Street, away from those who know her personally aside from her band, and Vernon is nowhere in sight to mandate her schedule the way it usually is. Her clutch bag in hand, still wearing her last dress for her last stage performance, and trying to keep that professionalism as the commander stands close to her, having caught her at the ATM machine five blocks away from the venue.

No bodyguards. No bouncers. No security joining her as they usually do when the night ends and she needed the backup once she left the venue. By Vernon's demand and yet there Olivia Winter is, standing without these restrictions, tilting her head at the commander, who was part of the audience of the show tonight.

Olivia had met Hanzo Hasashi on a Thursday, two shows ago, and their strange relationship is one she cherishes. Attracted to the man, without needing to say so, and the soft conversations they've had together in the short time they knew each other. Never poking about who he truly is and he doing the same, the pair merely savoring the time they get to see each other. She still didn't know what his job was or what he actually was, aside from hearing from others that he worked with the law, that much of his personal life was classified, and he had a links to the city officials in more than five districts.

All the jazz singer knew, the gem of the Blue Sax, is that he might be the one person who could help her right now, as the villain who caught her off guard along her path to her private dressing room that the venue gave her, stopped her at gunpoint, demanding she give in to whatever he requested.

An unfamiliar face. A thief who didn't understand the seriousness of who she was within the community of music and her own links to the criminal world and how she had captured the ears and hearts of mobsters and crime lords. That there were politicians who begged for her to be at elections and fundraisers, because Olivia Winter was not just known for her voice, but for her charities, for her volunteer work, and for her kindness. Unconditional in these actions and that's what everyone saw as a good publicity stunt. It puzzles her at first how the thief does not know, trying to talk it out before things got more than tense they need to be, before the gunman grabbed her elbow, pulled the gun up against her abdomen and demanded she remain quiet.

Five grand. That was nothing compared to the money she brings in with each show she does at the Blue Sax. But it not enough for her to risk to life, glaring at the gunman when he presses the gun further into her stomach, causing a groan and she's certain a bruise will develop a day later.

Olivia would not run. Not when the thief instructed her to take a route where fans might see her. Might ask for an autograph because the second she tries anything, it would not end well for anyone, and she thinks far more strongly for her fans than herself in this regard. The gunman lurking in the distance, Olivia feeling those eyes on her, and she gives those polite fake smiles when she sees a fan or someone who can't help but compliment her songs or dress.

The fact Hanzo found her, under the flickering street light, already having withdrawn two grand from her card, needing to keep taking money out so she could walk away from this without harming anyone, is a concerning surprise. She did not know what Hanzo did and if he was possibly someone who was just a mere man who tapped away behind a computer screen in an office. What Olivia did know is only a few feet away, hiding in an alley way, keeping their gaze on the jazz singer and commander, is armed and she would not want this man who has captured her interest, her fondness, to be harmed because of her.

"I saw you tonight." She begins, glancing to the corner of her sapphire eyes in caution, trying to hum, trying to make this casual. No usual honest happy grin she's given the commander before. No sparkle in her gaze, eyes dilating, as she usually does when she sees Hanzo. All because the worry that even if he could help her, do something to assist her, it would still be too risky. "I had wanted to see you, meet you at the bar, the way we have before but... somethin' came up. An emergency. It's why I need to stay here an' withdraw some cash, Mr. Hasashi. I, um, can meet you tomorrow maybe? We can have dinner. Lunch. Whatever you want. I just... need to finish this withdraw."

Fingertips tap against the hard material of her clutch bag. Fidgeting. Fumbling with her hands. Losing her patience and cool, awaiting for the commander to respond to her in this.

💥|| Hanzo does not answer her in words. This is the first thing that happens, and it happens so fast that later - when she tries to reconstruct the sequence for herself, lying awake and running her fingers over the bruise blooming dark beneath her ribs - she will not be able to say where his voice ended and his body began, because there was no interval between them.

There is only the fraction of a second in which he is standing three feet from her, head tilted with the polite, contained attention of a man listening to a woman explain an inconvenience, and the fraction after in which he is not standing there at all.

He has read her a hundred times now, across a hundred Thursday nights and half-lit corner tables - the register of her laugh, the particular cadence when she is teasing him and the different cadence when she is not, the way her hands move when she talks about music, unhurried, certain, conducting something only she can hear. He has catalogued her the way he catalogues everything, with the same involuntary precision he once reserved for terrain and threat vectors, except that with her the cataloguing had started to feel like something softer than reconnaissance. Like devotion wearing reconnaissance's clothes.

So when she says I saw you tonight with her eyes sliding to the corner of the street instead of finding his, when her fingers drum against the clutch bag in a rhythm with no music in it, when the sparkle that usually announces itself the instant she sees him simply does not arrive - he does not hear an excuse. He hears a discrepancy. And discrepancy, in the language his body has spoken longer than any other, is the only word that has ever meant danger.

His gaze moves once - not to her face, though it will return there, but past her, a single sweep of the street with the flat, cataloguing calm of a man checking a room before he permits himself to enter it. It finds the alley. It finds the wrongness in the shadow that thinks itself well-hidden, the faint asymmetry of a man standing where a man should not be standing, weight on the balls of his feet, attention fixed on the woman at the ATM like a hand closed around a leash.

Something in Hanzo goes very quiet and very fast at once - the paradox his men have learned to fear, the stillness that precedes the strike the way the drawn breath precedes the shout.

He crosses the distance without seeming to have moved through it. This is the particular horror and grace of him in motion: there is no windup, no visible decision, only intention translating itself instantly into consequence, the lean architecture of muscle uncoiling like something that has been compressed under enormous pressure and finally, finally permitted to release. He does not go toward Olivia. He goes past her, a shoulder's turn, a redirection so smooth it reads almost as courtesy, placing his body between her and the alley before she has finished processing that he moved at all.

The gunman has perhaps half a second to register a shape closing on him. He does not get to use it.

Hanzo's hand finds the wrist holding the weapon and does not grip so much as arrest it - a joint lock executed with the clean, indifferent efficiency of a man who has disarmed hands more dangerous than this one in worse light with less warning. The gun discharges into the pavement or does not discharge at all; either way it no longer matters, because in the same continuous motion Hanzo has stepped inside the man's guard, hip driving into him, using the thief's own weight and panic as the lever that puts him on the ground.

There is a sound - breath leaving a body that did not choose to release it, the particular flat percussion of a man meeting concrete with someone else's forearm across his throat. It is not loud. Violence, done correctly, rarely is. It is economical, almost courteous in its restraint, the gun already spun clear and vanished into Hanzo's own grip before the thief's mind has caught up to the fact that his was ever taken.

He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. He is a muscle weight pressing a man into stillness the way a stone presses into wet earth - inevitable, unhurried, entirely without malice and entirely without mercy, the two things in him that have never required each other's permission to coexist.

"You will not move," he says, low, in the register he uses for men under his command when the moment demands absolute clarity and nothing else. It is not a threat. It is a fact he is stating for the other man's benefit, the way one might warn a child about a stove.

Only then - weapon secured, threat pinned, the street's geometry re-mapped and re-secured in the space of a breath - does he lift his eyes to her.

And there, for just a moment, the commander recedes and something rawer surfaces in its place: the fast, involuntary sweep of a man checking for damage on the one terrain he has never learned to survey with detachment. His gaze finds her hand pressed to her side, the shallow catch in her breathing, and something tightens along his jaw that has nothing to do with tactics.

"Olivia." Her name, when he says it now, is no longer a door he is choosing to leave closed. "Are you hurt."

It is not quite a question. It is the sound of a man recalibrating everything he thought he understood about the shape of an evening, and finding that none of it matters half as much as the answer to that. 💥||

@vulpuslunae stabbed the heart.

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The dust does not settle so much as it hesitates, suspended in the dying light like ash unwilling to admit it was once something whole. Hanzo Hasashi stands within the wreckage of what Quan Chi used to be - bone rendered to powder, flesh rendered to smoke, a sorcerer's thousand cruelties reduced at last to a stain beneath his sandals. The fire in his chest has not gone out. It never does. It only banks itself, waiting, the way a curse waits, patient as a held breath spanning centuries.

He does not hear her approach so much as he feels the air change - a subtler thing than footsteps, a presence that does not announce itself with the clumsy noise of mortal feet. When he turns, he finds a woman where no woman should be able to stand, amid stone still groaning its way toward the sea, amid a battlefield that by rights should have swallowed her whole.

He does not know her. Has never known her. There is no name in him for the shape she wears, no memory that reaches out to claim her as kin or enemy. And yet she watches him with eyes too old for her face, gold and unblinking, as though she has been watching far longer than this single burning moment allows.

"Who summons a fox to stand in a graveyard," he says, and the words come dragged and slow, blood still weeping from the wound along his ribs, painting the broken stone beneath him in the same dark hue as the twilight bleeding through the smoke. He does not ask her name. Some deep and weary part of him understands that the asking would be wasted breath - that whatever she is, she will not be caught so easily in a mortal courtesy. "You did not have to let me see you. Spirits wiser than you have learned to stay hidden from what I've become."

The island heaves beneath them both, a slow dying thing, cracking apart in widening seams that swallow torchlight and starlight alike. He does not startle at the sound. He has heard worse collapse around him - heard his own bones break on this cursed ground, heard his wife and son scream in a memory that never stops replaying no matter how many centuries pass over it like water over stone.

He remains infuriatingly still amid the ruin, blood tracing unhurried rivers down his forearm, dripping from his fingers to join the pale ash of the sorcerer he has just finished erasing from the world.

"You come to me covered in nothing but curiosity," he continues, voice a low rasp scraped raw by fire and grief both, "and I do not know if you are come to gloat, to warn, or simply to witness a dead man discover he is still standing." A ghost of something bitter moves behind the twin embers of his eyes. "Quan Chi is ash now. I have burned the debt owed to my son, to my wife, to every year I spent screaming in that place beneath this world. And still - " his hand lifts, slow, almost reverent, toward the wound in his own chest, toward the place where peace was supposed to finally take root " - still there is nothing here. No stillness. No door closing. Only more fire, waiting to be given somewhere to go."

She does not flinch from him, and that alone unsettles something ancient and long-dormant in his chest - not fear, exactly, but a curious, unfamiliar wariness, the sense of being observed by something that understands more of his fate than he does himself. He wonders, briefly, distantly, whether she has come from some current he cannot see, some thread of destiny only creatures like her are permitted to glimpse. He does not ask. He is not certain he wants an answer that might cost him something he no longer has the strength to pay.

Stone shears from the cliffs below and vanishes into black water with a sound like the world exhaling its last breath, and still he does not reach for the portal humming quiet and patient beneath his skin - the hellfire that could carry him from this dying island in less time than it takes to draw breath. He remains instead, planted in the wreckage like something that has forgotten it is allowed to leave, blood cooling against broken stone, eyes fixed on the stranger who watched him earn his vengeance and did not look away.

"Stay, then, nameless one," he says at last, and something almost gentle moves beneath the wreck of his voice, the ash-grey shadow of a kindness he thought the Netherrealm had burned out of him entirely. "Watch the sea take what is left of this place, if that is why you've shown yourself. Or vanish again into whatever quiet you came from. I will not chase after answers I no longer have room to carry."

The island shudders once more, and Scorpion stands unmoved at its heart - wounded, undying, a man who slew the devil that wronged him only to discover, too late, that the devil was never the true author of his damnation. ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

This is her first thought. The she-fox does not utter this audibly. She does not need to. She appears in the wreckage of the dead, drawn to the scent of grief like a moth to flame, like oxygen feeding into fire as necessity.

Except the fire is this being that stands before her, and she cannot see his face, not yet, and she does not announce her arrival loudly - she never does. She lets the air change instead, for those trained to notice the subtle change in it. She stands there, waits for nothing, waits for him to turn, and she stands in a battlefield that would have swallowed her whole.

His face. She does not know him. She has never known him. There is no name for him, except that the whispers of a wraith, of a spectre so feared from lands afar - she does not fear him. She offers him no judgment either. No pity.

Only silence.

She is watching him with those eyes - gold, unblinking, and she is looking at him with ancient eyes far older than her, and perhaps far older than him - too old for her face, almost too out of place for the way the rest of her face display an unsurreal brightness of youth.

Who summons a fox to stand in a graveyard. It is not a question, or perhaps it is. She does not answer him immediately. She is only quiet, presence quieting around her, around them, the silence extending, reaching, expanding in the aftermath of whatever happened here, like a blanket that covers where the ruin has reached.

The smell of blood teases at her senses, her fox nose attuned to every scent and she is discipline combined with the ancestry she carries, legacy that is a burden and duty combined.

Spirits wiser than you have learned to stay hidden from what I've become.

She does not hide from him. She has let the air shift, found where there is much grief, much hurt, much blood - the painting of either mercy or vengeance presenting itself in full view, unadorned, only bloodied. Only ashed.

Witnessing.

She does not flinch. At his words. At whatever accounting of whatever he had done before her arrival. No judgment, and she suspects this unsettles him. She gives him nothing - only observing him and observing whatever moves in those embers - sulphuric yellow, nearly white - clouded with grief, with whatever he has lost, with what he has left in rebuilding, like smoke shielding the soul trapped inside.

The ground shakes. Cliffs at its edges collapsing and vanishing into the black waters like a final exhale, and from the distance a portal exists - humming. Waiting. And she remains still, remains unmoving, unflinching.

In a way, she is meditating. She is remembering. Remembering a place that has nothing to do with her, and yet the ruin draws her to places like this. To places like this island, foreign, dying, forgotten in the aftermath of what had happened in her.

She exhales, then finally she speaks.

"You carry much grief."

He had told her that she should have not shown herself. But she did.

She steps forward anyway. Single, deliberate. Fox-quiet. Ancient.

"The grief here has called me and I am its witness," she declares, with the presence of a priestess that has simply declared a ground - dying, stone crumbling, warning of what comes next. Neither of them move.

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| He hears her before she finishes speaking - no, that is wrong. He feels her, the way a man feels the first drop of rain before a storm he has already lived through a hundred times.

You carry much grief. The words land somewhere beneath the breastplate, beneath the wound, beneath even the place where his heart used to keep its steady human rhythm before the Netherrealm hollowed him out and refilled him with something that only remembers how to burn.

He laughs. It is not a laugh that belongs to living men. It scrapes up out of him like something dragged over broken glass, humorless, ancient, and it dies almost as soon as it is born - swallowed by the smoke still curling off the last of Quan Chi's undoing.

"Grief," he repeats, and the word tastes like ash on his tongue, like the ash already caked beneath his sandals. "You say it as though it were a garment. Something I might set down, fold, leave behind on this dying stone." His hand, still slick and dark with the sorcerer's ending, closes slowly into a fist, and for a moment the ember-light in his eyes flares brighter, a coal remembering it was once a wildfire. "I have worn this grief so long I no longer recall the shape of myself without it. It is not cloth. It is marrow. It is the thing that grew in place of the bone they broke."

The island groans again beneath them, a slow requiem of stone surrendering to black water, and still he does not move - plants himself instead in the ruin like some blood-anointed monument that has forgotten monuments are permitted to crumble too.

"I thought - " He stops. Starts again, quieter, rawer, the practiced fury bleeding out of his voice until what is left is something closer to confession than threat. "I thought there would be a floor beneath this. That when the debt was finally paid - when I had unmade the architect of my family's screaming - there would be something on the other side of it. A door. A silence I could rest in."

His jaw tightens. Smoke sighs from between his teeth like breath given shape by centuries of dying and not-dying. "There is no door, fox-spirit. I stand in the wreckage of the man who orchestrated every scream I have ever bled, and I feel - "

He does not finish it kindly. He does not finish it at all, not in words. Instead his gaze drops - to his own hands, red and trembling faintly now that the fight has drained out and left only the ledger behind, the terrible arithmetic of is this enough, was this ever going to be enough - and something in his shoulders sags, infinitesimal, a crack finally permitted to show now that no enemy stands close enough to exploit it.

"Emptiness," he says finally, and it is the closest thing to surrender he has spoken aloud in four hundred years. "Not nothing. I have known nothing - nothing is easier, nothing does not ache like this does. This is the echo left after the shout. This is standing in a house you burned down yourself and realizing you have nowhere else built to sleep."

His eyes lift back to her, iridescent white meeting ember, two old and unnatural things regarding one another across a battlefield neither of them chose to belong to.

"So do not tell me I carry grief as though it were news to me, little witness. I have carried it through Hell itself and out the other side, and I will carry it still when this island has finished sinking beneath us." A breath - ragged, more habit than necessity, lungs that do not truly need the air still performing the ritual of needing it. "What I do not know - what no sorcerer, no god, no vengeance has yet taught me - is how a man endures the carrying once there is nothing left worth avenging."

The wind shifts. Ash lifts off the stone like a thousand small ghosts finally given leave to rise, and Scorpion - Hanzo, somewhere far beneath the fire, still Hanzo - stands unmoved in the ruin of his own long war, waiting, for the first time in longer than he can remember, not for an enemy, but for an answer he does not expect the world to give him. ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

❄️|| The question hangs in the air between them, gentle as it is, and it lands somewhere Kuai Liang cannot immediately answer. Not because he does not know, but because the knowing has been buried beneath three days of ice and blood and the particular arithmetic of survival that never once made room for counting meals.

He tries to speak. What comes instead is a breath, ragged at the edges, dragged up from someplace deeper than his lungs.

"I don't - " The words fracture before they finish forming. His head tips back against the pillow, throat working around nothing, around the memory of hunger so old it has stopped announcing itself as hunger and started masquerading as simple absence. A hollowness worn smooth, like riverstone. He has to reach for the answer the way a man reaches for something dropped in dark water. "Before we left. Before the ridge." That's as far back as the thread goes before it dissolves into the fog of forced marches and frostbitten nights and the particular silence that follows a killing blow.

His cerulean eyes, usually so precise, so contained - the eyes of a man who calculates the angle of every blade before it's thrown - are glassy now, unmoored, drifting to find her face and then sliding, briefly, from it, as though his own body has stopped consulting him on where his attention goes. He blinks hard, once, twice, trying to drag himself back into focus, back into the room, back into the warmth of her hands still resting against his jaw.

"Three days," he says, finally, and it costs him something to say it plainly, without the armor of deflection he's spent a lifetime perfecting. "Maybe longer. I stopped - " A short, humorless exhale, not quite a laugh. "I stopped keeping count around the second dawn."

He does not tell her, not yet, of the things his hands did in those three days. Of the ridge painted in a silence that only comes after violence, the kind of quiet that rings louder than screaming. Of how Sub-Zero - not Kuai Liang, never Kuai Liang, not out there - moved through Lin Kuei's enemies the way winter moves through a dying forest: total, merciless, without hesitation or grief permitted room to breathe. He does not tell her how easily that version of himself sheds the man she loves, how it wears his skin without complaint, how efficient the cold becomes when there is no space left for anything warmer.

"This wasn't - " He stops, gathers what's left of himself, tries again. "This wasn't like the others, Olivia."

Her name steadies something in him, gives the confession a place to land.

"I have pushed myself before. Further than sense allows. It is the cost of what I am, what I lead." His hand, trembling, finds hers where it still cups his jaw, and he presses his palm weakly over her fingers - not to pull her away, but to anchor himself to the fact of her, solid and gold and here, when so much of the last three days has felt like something dreamed by a colder, harder ghost wearing his face. "But not like this. Not this far. Not this long."

His throat works. The confession does not come easily, not because he doesn't trust her with it, but because saying it aloud makes it real in a way that surviving it somehow hadn't.

"Every hour past the first day, I told myself - one more. One more hour, and then I could rest. But there was always another wounded body to carry off the field. Another warrior whose knees had given out before mine, who needed my hands steadier than theirs, my cold sharper than the fever creeping into an infected wound." His voice thins, catches, roughens further with the weight of memory. "I could not stop, Olivia. Not because I am too proud to stop - though you would be forgiven for believing that of me - but because every time I thought of resting, I thought of the sixty-three lives I marched into that ridge with. And I could not let myself become the reason that number grew smaller."

His eyes, glassy, find hers again, and there is something raw in them now, something usually kept sealed beneath layers of command and composure.

"I have led warriors before where the stakes were high. Where failure meant losing ground, losing pride, losing time we could not easily reclaim. But this - " His breath shudders. "This was different. This was not a battle where I could afford exhaustion, because exhaustion is what makes a Grandmaster miscalculate, and miscalculation is what makes a Lin Kuei warrior a corpse instead of a name I get to call out at roll come morning."

He swallows, and it is audible, dry, a testament to how long it has been since anything crossed his lips beyond the occasional forced mouthful of water.

"So I did not eat, because eating meant pausing, and pausing meant someone else's wound waited longer to be dressed. I did not rest, because resting meant closing my eyes on a body that still trembled with cryomancy I hadn't the strength to fully leash, and if I lost control even for a moment - " He shakes his head, faint, as if trying to physically dislodge the thought. "I could have frozen my own men where they slept. I could not risk it. Not when so many of them are barely more than boys who followed me because they believed I would bring them home."

A pause. His thumb moves, faint and uncoordinated, against the back of her hand - an apology articulated in touch because his voice has nearly spent itself.

"I brought them home, Olivia. All of them. Every single one." Something in his voice breaks open on the words, some floodgate finally allowed to give after three days of holding rigid against its own pressure. "That was the only ledger I let myself keep. Not hunger. Not sleep. Just - count them. Count them again. Make certain the number matched what I left with."

His eyes slip shut, briefly, exhaustion and relief tangling together until it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

"I didn't think I'd earned rest until I knew, with my own eyes, that everyone I brought home was actually home. And even then - " A ghost of a wry, self-deprecating breath. "Even then some fool part of me wanted to stay upright a while longer. Just in case. Just to be certain."

The scent of broth and ginger and something achingly like care threads through the air toward him, and his stomach twists - not with revulsion, but with a hunger so belated it feels almost like grief, mourning the days it went ignored. His gaze drifts, unfocused, toward the tray Olivia has set within reach, toward the careful architecture of dishes made with a tenderness he does not yet have words for.

"Help me sit up," he asks, quiet, stripped of the pride that would have refused such a request three days ago, before the ridge, before the ache in his marrow taught him something about the limits even ice must respect.

Olivia does, and he lets her, lets his weight lean into her strength without the reflexive apology that usually accompanies needing anyone at all. Once upright, propped against the headboard with pillows gathered at his back, his trembling hands reach for the bowl of rice first - not the eggs, not the fish, just the plainest thing, the thing that asks the least of a stomach gone unfamiliar with the act of eating.

The first mouthful undoes him more than he expects.

It is warm - warmer than anything he has tasted in days, warmer than the broth he ladled with numb fingers for his warriors while denying himself the same mercy - and the simple, ordinary act of chewing, swallowing, feeling something settle into the hollow ache beneath his ribs, nearly brings a sound out of him that is embarrassingly close to a groan. His eyes squeeze shut around it. His hand, cradling the bowl, does not quite steady, and a little rice nearly spills from the unsteadiness of his grip before Olivia's fingers close gently over his to help guide it.

"Slow," she murmurs, and he obeys her, for once, without argument.

He eats slower after that, though slower does not mean restrained - there is a helplessness to it, an animal urgency he tries and fails to fully leash, hunger long denied finally given permission to be loud. The eggs, silken, vanish next, and then the fish, and between mouthful and mouthful his glassy cerulean eyes lift to find her, as though needing to confirm, again and again, that this is real and not some fevered mercy his body has conjured to survive the last mile home.

"Olivia." Her name, when it leaves him between bites, is barely more than breath, but it carries the whole unraveling weight of him within it - gratitude, exhaustion, the quiet astonishment of a man who spent three days being a weapon and has only now remembered, in the golden warmth of her presence, what it feels like to be permitted softness. "Forgive me. For making you worry. For making you wait so long to see me undone like this. For making you reveal what you keep hidden, just to carry my sorry weight down a hallway."

He does not finish the whole tray - his body surrenders to fullness and fatigue faster than his hunger anticipated, stomach unused to being so generously filled after days of starving itself into silence - but he eats more than he has in seventy hours, and when his hand finally falls still against the edge of the bowl, his head tips, heavy, toward her shoulder.

"Stay," he breathes, half command, half plea, the syllable dissolving into the warmth of her nearness as sleep finally closes its hand around him. "Just - stay. While I remember what it means to be cared for, and not merely needed." ❄️||

"Three days."

Olivia repeats the words with flat annoyance. Never anger. Never that. But annoyance in how Kuai Liang could be so reckless, even when his recklessness was in the name of keeping his people, the Lin Kuei, safe in this last mission.

Her gaze softens at the grandmaster when she assist him against the pillows, propped and clean, and how the weight of his body still shows even when he lounges. The glassy blue of Kuai Liang's gaze. The way the exhaustion shows even there. How the chill that clings to him, spread throughout his bedroom, and Olivia can only be grateful for her own warmth allowing the room to each a moderate balance for the two and the tray of warm food that is ready for her beloved.

Kuai Liang's explanation, of how this mission was not like the others, in how his determination to make sure that all his men return home safe and sound, is at a cost of his own wellbeing. This in itself, does bring a small swell of pride for the grandmaster, because she knows how in the past, with previous Lin Kuei leaders, those who were too weak, too distracted, too feebleminded, were left behind. Never enough to return to their home because only those with strength deserve to reside within the Lin Kuei.

"I have never seen such pride in you, my love." It is the truth that comes from her. Kuai Liang, although he does have his ego and stubbornness, is not someone who pushes forward because of vanity. Never that. Not when it came to others he holds dearly. "I would never think you would put yourself through such adversity because you wished to prove yourself. That, my dearest winter star, is not who you are as a warrior."

Her hands, those warm fingertips that caress over the grandmaster's jaw, his cheekbones, shivers when he returns his own reassuring comfort towards her. Kuai Liang's thumb against the back of her hand, settling there, far too fatigued and in his thoughts to rub, but Olivia knows he would on a better evening.

Then, when he speaks of his cryomancy, does the sun goddess still against his touch.

Olivia has seen what his power can do. How it can spread, destroy, and falter all within minutes of being summoned. The fear of freezing his men, through the lens of a goddess who has witnessed what he can do, is rational. For the risk is there, the past has proven it is possible, and Olivia frowns at hearing what her dearest has confessed to her.

"Oh, my love." She exhales, that worried annoyance receding ever so slightly, as her eyebrows knit together in concern of what he's says. "The dread you feel, is one I know plagues you, and I know there is not much I can say to ease the tension in your heart as we both know what your ice can do to others, but find relief that you did not lose control. Find reassurance that you were victorious in bringing back your warriors and none were taken by a death that ends in an early winter."

"But-" Olivia continues, her hand that cups his cheek, sliding down away from him, to allow her hands to rest on her lap where she sits by his side, "-I must wonder what would happen if your body had collapse on the mission and without your mind intact to control yourself, if your cryomancy would've done without you knowing. I have seen your ice spread in your deepest of slumbers, my love, and I cannot imagine how your cryomancy would've spread if you blacked out from lack of rest and meals."

She pouts. This vulnerable, beautiful expression that none are aware exists in her immortal life. The warmth within her staining her sun-kissed skin upon her face, almost golden in hue, as Olivia refuses to hide her feelings about this.

"It was still foolish. Admirable and noble but still foolish. I can imagine how your warriors must've felt to see their grandmaster refusing to give himself a breather because he wished to make sure they would survive the mission and journey back home safetly."

Her voice holds no rage, no fury, only that unbridled distress that comes from a woman who loves passionately. That what she says comes from a place of fretfulness seeing the man she loves in such a state. From the moment Kuai Liang had returned at the gate, the heavy darkness underneath his cerulean eyes, the way one's exterior appears oily and untamed when they refuse to care for themselves, the tightness of his muscles from dehydration, was present as an early dawn.

Now, she wishes to say but does not, nodding at the grandmaster when he asks her help her up, you can rest without the eyes of others who think of you as a mighty leader. The sun goddess helps him, without a grunt or moan of discomfort, because the weight of her beloved is not one she would ever complain of. Propped up against the headboard, making sure the pillows do not leave a dent of discomfort against his lower back, does Olivia turn to bring the tray of food closer.

Instantly, without a word, Kuai Liang reaches for the bowl of rice first. Fluffy and warm. Washed and made by the hands of divinity. It doesn't change the shape or taste of the rice but Olivia knows the meal made with the intentions to feed someone out of love, holds energy that cannot be describe easily in words.

At first Olivia isn't sure what to say when Kuai Liang takes the first bite, the tightening of his eyes after he swallows, wondering what must be going through his body and mind after tasting her meal. When his unsteady hold on the bowl of rice catches her gaze, she takes his gently. Slow, she murmurs, and a small smile curls up when Kuai obeys without so much as a word of argument.

The rest of the meal is consumed in silence. The silken steamed eggs are gone. The poached fish, which was swimming with it's own broth of herbs and taste, is not completely consumed but it is enough for the sun goddess to be happy with. She does not expect Kuai Liang to stuff himself but to merely sustain his appetite, to soothe the discomfort within his stomach, so that it does not eat away at itself. So that when sleep comes for the grandmaster, he has more than five hours of it, without his hunger awakening him with a gnawing pain.

The hand that helps Kuai Liang, to hold the bowl when it trembles, so it does not spill at the corner of his lips when he drinks from it due to his staggering grip, continues to aid after the meal. Taking what dishes are empty, the ones that are not, and the tray to set to the side, holding off on cleaning what is left behind for a later time.

Olivia blinks at Kuai Liang's next words. Asking for forgiveness. For making her worry, for it is not something she hides around the warrior, and how she decided to reveal her true form to her beloved so that she could carry him down the hallway.

She is surprised by this, not because Kuai Liang is not a man who has never asked for forgiveness, but because Olivia did see the reveal of who she was, is, as something to ask forgiveness for.

"I will always forgive you, my dearest Kuai Liang, over the worry you have brought me. I would never fault you for doing what is right by your people and the worry I feel is nothing but my love wishing to make itself known for you. But do not be sorry for being allowed to see me for who I am. I had intended to show you, one day, when the time properly called for such intimacy but… " Olivia smiles, honeyed and loving, at Kuai now. "…I do not regret what I have revealed to you and how it was shown. I did what I did as an act of my devotion to you. I would of done the same if we were on the battlefield or any unplanned scenario, Kuai."

When Kuai Liang's head tips, falling towards her shoulder, heavy and fatigued, does Olivia inch closer to him on the bed. The tray is gone. The bowls of a warm meal prepared by the sun goddess are not forgotten, not when it was a gift given, but set aside after doing their duties to feed. All that is left is their company, the warmth and chill of who they are, mingling with each other in a silent reunion that does not cause steam to spread around them.

Olivia's hands reach up and pull Kuai Liang closer to her. To settle against her shoulder, so that his forehead can press into her, and she hums finally, that pleased and content sound she makes when all her worries and frustrations are gone.

"I had no intentions to leave your side, Kuai," She whispers against his temple, fingertips caressing over his cheek, tenderly and soothing, "but thank you. For saying you want me to stay. That means more than you might realize, my winter star."

For to hear the grandmaster of the Lin Kuei, who never pleas no matter what his gaze says, who only commands his subordinates when it comes to operations, gives this unguarded side to himself towards her, is an emotion that she did not think she was yearning for. For Olivia does not know if she is truly wanted by Kuai Liang nor if she is needed in his life the same way she feels for him. As a grandmaster, of one of the most heartless clans of assassins, having attachments as the one they have, as goddess and warrior, might not always be a top priority to his life.

"I will always carry the weight of you, Kuai, no matter how much you believe it is 'sorry', for I will never believe you are a pitiful. I only believe that you, my warrior who reminds me of polar bears, should be allowed to be carried when your body cannot."

❄️|| Sleep does not take him so much as it claims him, and even in that claiming Kuai Liang resists - a final, stubborn reflex of a body that has spent decades learning punishment is the price of softness. His head rests against her shoulder, heavy as a felled tree, and still some fraction of him keeps vigil, some ember of the Grandmaster refusing to fully surrender its post even now, even here, even safe.

He hears her. That is the strange mercy of this half-place between waking and dream - her voice does not fade the way the rest of the world does, does not blur into the grey static that usually swallows him when exhaustion finally wins. I will always carry the weight of you. The words move through him the way warmth moves through frostbitten flesh, painful before it is anything else, an ache that comes from feeling returning to something that had gone numb so long ago he forgot it was capable of sensation at all.

His scars remember before his mind does.

They rise faintly beneath her fingertips wherever they trace his skin - old topography, a lifetime's cartography of a man taught that mercy is a wound you give yourself. Each one a doctrine broken. Each one the cost of choosing not to become the blade the old masters demanded of him. A tremor moves through his broad frame - not the practiced stillness of command, not the frozen discipline he wears like a second skin in front of his warriors, but something rawer, involuntary, his body's confession of everything his voice has learned to withhold.

His shoulders, wide enough to have carried the wounded, the dying, the entire weight of a clan's survival for years uncounted, shudder faintly beneath the accumulated debt of every meal skipped in the name of duty, every hour of sleep sacrificed to vigilance. The mountain trembles. It does not fall.

And then sleep drags him under fully, and with it comes the old architecture of memory - not gentle, not kind, built instead from stone and iron and the particular cold of rooms meant to break a man rather than shelter him.

He is younger in the dream. Younger, and somehow more breakable for it, though the stubbornness wears the same face it does now, unaged, unbending, a thing that seems to have existed in him before he had years enough to earn it. The cell is small. It is always small in memory, smaller than it likely was, shrunk further by the retelling his mind insists on giving it each time it returns. Stone walls sweating with damp. No fire. No warmth but what his own battered blood can generate, and even that is failing him, guttering low like a candle starved of air.

He does not know, in the dream, how many hours he has been down here. Time had stopped meaning anything precise around the second beating, folding instead into a single continuous ache that has no beginning he can locate and no promised end. His wrists are bound above him, rope biting deep enough that his hands have long since gone the pale, bloodless color of something already dying, fingers curled uselessly, and still he does not allow himself the mercy of hanging fully from that rope.

Still he keeps his knees beneath him, keeps some fraction of his weight on legs that shake with the effort of simply remaining upright, because to collapse fully—to let the rope take all of him - was its own kind of surrender, and surrender was the one thing they could never be permitted to see.

Weakness invites the blade, the old masters had taught him, though it was never phrased so plainly. It was taught instead through absence. Through silence when he called for water. Through the particular disappointment on their faces when he'd refused, days earlier, to bring his blade down on an old woman who had done nothing but exist in the wrong village on the wrong night. He remembers her eyes more than he remembers the punishment that followed his refusal - rheumy, resigned, already prepared for a death she had clearly expected long before he arrived. He remembers thinking, even as the first strike landed across his back for his defiance, that he would make that same choice again. That he would make it a hundred times, a thousand, no matter what it cost his body to keep choosing it.

The blood comes readily to memory too - it always does. Warm at first where the whip or the blade had opened him, and then cooling fast in the cell's relentless chill, tracing thin dark rivers down skin that had not yet learned to scar over into the mountain range it would eventually become. He remembers watching a bead of it fall from his jaw to the stone floor and thinking, with the strange calm detachment exhaustion sometimes grants, that is mine. That belongs to me. They have not taken it, only spilled it. As though there were some meaningful ownership left to claim in a body being systematically unmade.

His mind, even then, screamed at him to let go. To slip beneath the surface of consciousness the way drowning men are told to stop fighting the water. The temptation lived behind his eyes like a fever, a soft dark voice promising relief, promising that unconsciousness was not defeat, only rest, only the body doing what bodies are built to do when pain outpaces endurance. And still - stubborn even against his own mind's mutiny - he refuses it. Refuses to give the old masters the satisfaction of finding him slumped and insensate come morning, as though his defiance could only be proven awake, as though sleep itself were another doctrine he would not bow to.

He counts his own heartbeat instead. A soldier's trick, learned from some warrior long dead now, whispered to him once as a way of anchoring the mind to something steady when everything else conspires toward collapse. Count, and you will not fall. Count, and the body remembers it still belongs to you. So he counts. One. Two. Three. The rhythm ragged, uneven, threatening at every fourth or fifth beat to abandon him entirely, but he drags it back each time, stubbornly, viciously, the way a man drags a wounded comrade back from a ledge.

Somewhere in the dream's shifting logic, dawn arrives, grey and indifferent, sliding thin light through the cell's single high window. He does not remember, even now, whether it was the first dawn or the third. Only that when they finally cut him down, his knees would not hold him, and he did not care, because he had not given them the collapse. He had taken it for himself, on his own account, after the rope was gone and there was no one left to witness it as anything but the simple mathematics of a body finally permitted to stop.

I stopped keeping count around the second dawn, he'd told her, awake, in the golden warmth of tonight. He does not tell her, cannot tell her, not even in dream, that the counting he abandoned this time was the same counting that once kept a boy alive in a stone cell for choosing mercy over obedience. That some part of him has been counting heartbeats against collapse for longer than he can properly remember not doing it.

In the dream, the old masters' faces blur and shift, becoming for a moment other faces - warriors from the ridge, wounded and trembling, their eyes holding the same rheumy resignation the old woman's once had. And Kuai Liang, dreaming, reaches for them the way he could not reach for her, all those years ago, bound and bleeding in a cell built to teach him that gentleness was a flaw to be excised.

He reaches, and this time, no one stops his hand.

Somewhere above the dream, in the golden warmth of a room that smells of ginger and broth and devotion, his fingers tighten faintly around Olivia's, some buried part of him translating decades-old defiance into this new and unfamiliar language - not the refusal to fall, but the permission, finally, to be caught.

His hand, heavy and still cold at its edges despite her warmth, finds hers where it rests against his cheek, and holds it there. Not gripping. Not pulling her closer, for he no longer has the strength for that kind of claiming. Only resting. Only anchoring, the way a man half-drowned finally stops fighting the current and lets the shore hold him instead.

I will always carry the weight of you.

Somewhere beneath the frost and the discipline and the decades of learning that his worth was measured only in what he could endure alone, something in Kuai Liang that has never once been permitted to rest finally, finally does. ❄️||

NSFW things to say to submissive muses II @sasorikigai said: “Why are you biting your pillow? Don’t want me to hear you?” (He’s fucking Olivia from the behind, modern au)

💥|| Hanzo feels Olivia's walls tighten around his slick length like a velvet fist, her body's silent scream transmitted through the pulsing grip of her inner muscles. He remains still for a heartbeat longer, savoring the way her cunt clenches around him, how her juices coat his shaft with each subtle movement she makes despite her attempts at stillness.

The commander's hands slide from her hips to her shoulders, fingers pressing into the soft flesh there as he leans forward, his chest molding against her back. His breath comes hot against her ear as he whispers, "Let me hear you, my songbird. Your voice is what I crave most."

With deliberate slowness, Hanzo withdraws until just the crown of his cock remains inside her, then thrusts forward with calculated precision, angling himself to strike that sensitive bundle of nerves that makes her entire body jolt. He repeats the motion, each withdrawal agonizingly slow, each entrance devastatingly deep, building the tension between them like a string stretched to its breaking point. The jazz singer's muffled cries against the pillow only fuel his desire to draw forth the symphony of her pleasure.

Something primal builds in Hanzo's lower abdomen, a coiling heat that promises release. His mouth finds the curve of her neck, teeth grazing the sensitive skin there before his lips claim hers in a feverish kiss, tongue delving deep to taste the essence of her moans. "Don't hide from me," he growls against her mouth, one hand snaking around to cup her throat gently, feeling the vibrations of her suppressed cries. "I want to swallow every sound you make."

The commander increases his pace now, hips snapping forward with renewed vigor, the wet sounds of their coupling filling the room along with Olivia's increasingly unrestrained whimpers. Hanzo's free hand slides between her thighs, fingers finding the swollen nub of her clit, circling it in time with his thrusts. He feels her body begin to tremble uncontrollably, her inner muscles fluttering around him in the unmistakable rhythm of approaching orgasm. "That's it," he murmurs, his voice thick with desire. "Let go for me, Olivia. Let me hear you sing."

Hanzo feels himself teetering on the precipice, that exquisite agony of holding back his release while driving Olivia ever closer to hers. His balls draw up tight against his body, the coil in his abdomen winding impossibly tighter as he fights the urge to spill himself inside her welcoming heat. Instead, he redoubles his efforts, his hips moving with calculated intensity as he angles himself to strike that secret place within her that makes her entire body convulse with pleasure.

The commander's mouth claims hers again in a passionate kiss, swallowing the cries she can no longer contain as his fingers continue their merciless assault on her clit. He feels her approaching orgasm in the way her inner muscles begin to spasm around him, in the way her back arches uncontrollably, in the way her fingers claw desperately at the sheets beneath them. "Come for me, my love," he growls against her lips, his voice ragged with restraint. "Let me feel you fall apart around my cock." 💥||

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The wind moves through the Fire Gardens before Hanzo speaks, stirring the hem of his robes, carrying the scent of ash and cherry blossom in equal measure - the two things his life has always been made of, sweetness and burning, indistinguishable now, one taste upon the tongue.

He does not answer at once. The silence stretches like a wound too old to close cleanly, and when he finally speaks, his voice is low - gravel dragged across the bottom of a well that has long since run dry of anything resembling grace.

"Remorse," he repeats, tasting the word as though it were ash left behind long after the fire has gone cold. "You call it remorse. I call it a debt that grows heavier with each dawn I am cursed to see." His eyes - sunset eyes, she calls them, though he wonders sometimes if what burns there is only embers of the hellfire that made him - do not lift to meet hers. They stay fixed upon the river, watching it carry the lily blooms downstream, indifferent, the way time is indifferent to the dead who cannot be un-killed.

"You speak of Takeda. Of Kuai Liang." A breath, ragged, torn loose from somewhere beneath the sternum where old grief still nests like something living. "You would have me believe a boy's laughter and a rival's forgiveness are scales enough to weigh against a clan. Against a wife. Against a son whose voice I no longer remember without the screaming underneath it." His hand - the one that has drawn kunai across a hundred throats, guilty and innocent alike, in the name of a vengeance built on a liar's foundation - curls at his side, knuckles whitening, though he does not raise it. He has learned, at least, to keep his fury still in her presence. That much progress he will grant himself, grudgingly, like a man counting coins he is not sure he is owed.

"Quan Chi's deceit does not return what was taken. It does not un-spill what I spilled." His jaw tightens, the muscle there working like something trying to hold a dam from breaking. "I know this now. Knowing does not unmake the doing. I still hear them, Olivia. Not only the ones I loved. The ones I ended believing them guilty of a crime that was never theirs. Their faces do not fade simply because I have learned, too late, to call myself deceived rather than damned."

He turns, finally, and there is something almost tender in the way he looks at her - tender the way a blade is tender against skin it does not yet mean to cut. "You ask me not to let the guilt rule me. I do not know how to obey that. Some days I wake and the weight is bearable, and I tell myself this is what healing must feel like, this small mercy of breath without agony beneath it. And then there are days - "

He stops. The sentence does not finish. He will not hand her that particular truth, the one that lives in the hours when the Fire Gardens go dark and the peace she speaks of feels like a mercy meant for other men, men who did not do what he has done. He swallows whatever else might have followed, and lets the silence stand in its place, a door he will not open even for her.

He is quiet a long moment before he speaks again, and when he does, his tone has shifted - quieter still, stripped further of the anger that armors him, revealing beneath it something closer to bewilderment. "There is another thing," he says, "a thing I turn over in the dark hours, when even hellfire cannot warm the cold that settles in my chest." He exhales, slow, as though the breath itself is unfamiliar to him still, a borrowed thing he has not yet learned to trust.

"I was not meant to have this. Any of it." His hand lifts, gestures faintly to the bridge beneath their feet, to the river, to his own chest where a heart beats that by every right of the world should have stopped its rhythm centuries ago in a village turned to slaughter. "A wraith does not get to become a man again. A specter bound to vengeance does not get resurrection as a gift. And yet here I stand, flesh instead of flame, breath instead of the Netherrealm's endless dark, and I do not know what I have done to deserve such a mercy when I have done so little to deserve mercy at all."

He shakes his head slowly, sunset eyes distant now, fixed on some horizon only he can see - one built of memory rather than sky. "I think sometimes it would have been a kinder justice to remain what Quan Chi made of me. Bone and hatred and fire without end. At least then my suffering would have made a terrible sort of sense. At least then I would not stand here, restored, whole by the reckoning of others, and still feel every death I caused pressing against this borrowed skin like it does not belong to me." His voice catches, barely, on the word borrowed - as though even now, so long since Raiden and fate and whatever tangled mercy conspired to give him back his blood and breath, he cannot fully believe the flesh is his to keep. "I am told I should be grateful. I am told this is what atonement looks like, when the gods themselves decide a man has suffered enough to earn back his own pulse. But gratitude and grief are not so easily separated, Olivia. They live in the same chamber of me, tangled root over root, and I cannot pull one free without disturbing the other."

His gaze finds hers again, and there is a rare nakedness in it now, the kind he rations out to almost no one, the kind that costs him something each time he allows it. "I did not ask to be given the chance to tell of what I have done. I did not ask to carry these trials forward into a life I was never supposed to keep living. A ghost's atrocities die with the ghost. Mine did not have that grace. I still walk among the living who remember, among the dead who cannot forget even in whatever peace they were granted, and I am left here - flesh, blood, breath - forced to hold the full weight of what a wraith did, without even the excuse of being wholly wraith any longer to hide behind." A humorless sound escapes him, not quite a laugh. "Some days I think this body was not a gift at all. I think it was simply Raiden's cruelest sentence - to make me remember all of it as a man, rather than let me forget it as a monster."

He looks down at his own hands then, turning them slightly, as though searching for the seams where fire once lived beneath the skin, some scar that might explain why he alone was chosen to carry a second life through the ruin of the first. "I do not resent the mercy, Olivia. I only do not understand it. I do not know what a man such as I am supposed to do with a second chance he was never owed, in a world that still bears the wounds of everything he did with the first."

"You speak of peace as though it waits for me somewhere down this path," he says, returning at last to her words, to the offering she laid before him on the bridge. "I do not believe it does, my love. I think peace is a word for men who were not the hand that held the blade. I was. I am." His gaze softens, if only barely, when it settles on her face - the one steady thing in a life that has been mostly fire and ruin. "But I will walk beside you regardless. Not because I believe I will find what you are hoping for. Only because you are still here, waiting, when you had every right long ago to stop."

He falls quiet again, and this time the quiet is not distant, not closed - it is an offering, small and unpolished, of everything he has just allowed her to see.

He does not tell her of the nights the weight becomes unbearable, when the thought of laying this borrowed body down for good drifts through him quiet and persistent as the river below them. That confession he keeps locked behind his teeth, a mercy he grants her rather than himself, because there are burdens even he will not set upon the one person who has never once looked away from him.

Instead he only reaches, after a long moment, to still her hand within his own - rough palm against hers, fire-scarred and steady despite everything - and lets that single, wordless gesture speak the parts of him language has never been strong enough to carry. ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

Olivia shakes her head at the grandmaster, her beloved as he speaks of these feelings that many do not know of, urging what he says is not entirely true of her own thoughts.

"I would not have you believe that the scales of what you have achieved in the present will outweigh the past. Against a home, a wife, and a child. Nothing, and I will remind you if you should ever doubt this of me, nothing will ever surpass the grief you feel for losing the life you once had. I only wish to remind you that you have grown, made progress in this new life that you believe might be a curse, and that you have changed the lives of others for the better, my dearest."

The chimes within the Fire Gardens jingle when the wind moves against them, allowing that soft melody to reach the ears of all who reside within it. Olivia finds she is not memorized or distracted by such melodies, far too focused, far too determined to reach the grandmaster right now.

Olivia listens, oh does she always listen when the grandmaster speaks to her of his grief, of his doubts and of his troubles, because although it is painful to hear, it is part of this man that she loves. This man, who still holds his wife and son close to his heart, the way he does all of those he loves, and it is a fact Olivia both admires and adores.

She longs to hear the truth of what is in his heart, no matter how dark or painful they might be, because for a sun goddess that loves eternal, she yearns to know the thoughts of Hanzo Hasashi, this warrior who continues to move her so.

When Hanzo becomes still, silent and merely stands by her side, not in the way a ghost lingers above a tombstone, but as a man readying himself to speak further of what is on his shoulders, Olivia allows the silence to remain. The calm before the quiet rainstorm that might bring a gentle peaceful night of sleep or a morning flooded with water that one cannot dry.

I was not meant to have this. Any of it.

He speaks of a kinder justice. Undeserving of what life has given him now. That the Fire Gardens, the reborn Shirai Ryu, and the alliances and connections he's created in this new world of his, was not meant for a specter born from vengeance and anguish. Uncertain of why someone such as himself, who has brought others so much pain and death, deserves a second chance this mercy of life.

Bone and hatred and fire without an end. Something Olivia did not dare think would leave Hanzo's lips, because such a truth hadn't been thought of. Her own thoughts come to light, internally and within herself, as she awaits for the right time to speak. To allow Hanzo to release the ache that has tightened in his heart, crowding his chest not by bone and muscle but of guilt and grief. That to be grateful, to embrace this second chance he was given, isn't an easy acceptance in the past he continues to hold.

"Maybe it is why you did not ask for this chance that you were given it, my love," Olivia answers, her reply softened and stepping closer to him, stripping away any distance between them so that he can feel her fire as it thrums for him in this instance, "because maybe the world saw that you deserved it most of all." She shakes her head, that small smile she carries for Hanzo faltering to a thin line, frowning.

"Lord Raiden has spoken to me of the day you returned with his magic. That battle against Quan Chi, Lord Raiden had intended to reverse the magic of the necromancer to save the life of another, and as a result, you, the solider Jax and the dearest Kuai Liang were returned to your true forms. It is an uneasy truth to say but Lord Raiden held no true intentions to bring you back. There is doubt in me that Lord Raiden purposely meant to sentence you to a new life in an attempt to force you to remember what you did when you were Scorpion. Lord Raiden is many things and he holds his grudges, but he is not so cruel as to curse someone who already knows what hell they've been through after seeing the light."

"I can see you do not resent the mercy, Hanzo. I can see you do not understand why this was given to you but in all that you have conducted, in all the mistakes you've made, I can see that you feel remorse and grief over what you have committed to others. You call it a debt but I do not think you truly do sometimes. Someone who carries this debt that you speak of would not be as honorable as you are, my love. You, who has seen hell and death, understands it above anyone else just how unbearable it is to ever place it as something as trivial as a debt that must be paid, for the dead and the living are not meant to be seen as such."

"Peace, this peace you speak of," Her hand takes Hanzo's offered hand, certain and slowly, until her fingertips are curling into his palm, and linking their fingers together, "is only those meant for who do not hold a blade. I was not born with a blade in my hand, my desert thorn, but I was born with a fire that could kill millions within a second. I was born with the knowledge that I could be used as a weapon, if I allowed others to see me as such, and that is the truth that comes with my birth. I have maimed in the name of pride. I have burned in the name of love. I have taken life in all that I believe was good, when others might think of it vile and cruel. That is my burden to bear and I carry that remorse as strongly as I carry my love for those who are no longer here."

"By this logic, that my fire should be a blade I have held since before I could speak any human tongue, that I am not allowed peace. And if this is so the truth for beings such as us, then maybe the peace I wish for you, is one that will not come with me as well."

Hanzo holds her hand, rough against the softness of her slender fingers, and she once again allows the silence to sit with them. To allow her words, her voice, to echo within the grandmaster. Olivia is uncertain if what she says has brought him hope, comfort, or something else entirely, but it is how she feels of this. That she believes Hanzo deserves this second chance, above anyone else, after all that he has lost because monstrous evils in the world pulled him away from the life he built on devotion and loyalty.

Olivia knows that he will not always speak his mind, of those nights that weight heavy on his soul and core, but just as she continues to wait for Hanzo, no matter what battles and death awaits him, she will wait for this too.

A chuckle escapes her, gentle and honeyed, when Hanzo's words of how she had every right to stop long ago when it comes to her patience of him, of waiting for him in what chaos and torture he was given, all because her love for the grandmaster remain steady as it does today and tomorrow and the centuries beyond.

"I will always wait for you, my love, my Hanzo, because I know you would never leave me to wait long. The peace we both speak of, that might not be there for us, for we are flawed and do not deserve such pleasantries in life, is one I would rather never have, if it meant I can walk side by side with you. Waiting or not, in light or in darkness, in fire or in shadow, being by your side is all I want to be." Her smile returns, although it is not as sweet as before, instead reaching to Hanzo in hopes to comfort him on this bridge they stand on within the Fire Gardens. A reassuring smile that hopes that what she says will mean something to him one day. "Sometimes I wonder if you believe you deserve what we have, my darling, only because I am a part of this new life you have built."

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The wind carries her words into him like embers settling into old wood, and for a long moment Hanzo does not answer. There are truths that do not come easily to the tongue even when the heart has already spoken them a thousand times in the dark, rehearsed against the inside of his ribs on nights when sleep would not have him.

He turns his hand within hers, slow, as though testing whether flesh can truly hold what has always burned beneath it.

"You call it mercy," he says at last, low, the words dragged up from somewhere deep and scorched, "and I do not deny it. I do not resent what was given back to me, Olivia - the breath, the blood, this borrowed pulse beating where once there was only hollow and hunger. I have told you this and I mean it still." His jaw tightens, a muscle working there like something trying to hold a dam from breaking.

"But mercy does not empty a vessel before it fills it anew. It does not scour out what vengeance carved into the marrow before it lets a man walk again as flesh. I carry both now. The gift and the ruin that came before it, tangled root over root, the way you said grief and gratitude live in the same chamber of you. Mine is no different. Only the second room in me is not grief alone. It is fire that has never once, not for a single hour since Harumi's blood soaked into the floor of our home, gone fully cold."

He looks down at his own hand, turning it, watching the firelight of the Gardens catch along old scars that no longer mark a wraith's ruin but a man's remembering.

"There is a thing you have not asked me, Olivia, though I think you have wondered it in the quiet hours the way I have. Whether I deserve this." His voice does not rise, but something beneath it shifts, deepens, like a riverbed dropping suddenly into water too dark to see the bottom of. "You speak of Raiden's magic as though it fell upon me by accident, a stray current of power meant for another and mine only by chance of proximity. Perhaps that is true of the how. It is not true of the why I still stand here after. A man is not returned to flesh simply because a god's spell went wide. Something in me was judged fit to hold a heartbeat again. And I do not know what that something is, because I remember, more clearly than I remember my son's laughter some cruel mornings, that I was not only made into Scorpion. I became him. Willingly. With my own two hands and my own furious, grieving heart, I chose the blade over the question. I chose vengeance before I ever confirmed whose hands had truly lit the fire that took my family from me."

He exhales, and it is not steam or smoke but something close to it, something the Fire Gardens themselves seem to lean toward, drawn to a heat that answers their own restless burning.

"Quan Chi did not force my hand to the hilt, Olivia. He only placed the whisper in my ear, and I - I, who had buried a wife and a son not an hour before, who stood in the ash of everything I had built and loved - I let that whisper become gospel because I wanted it to be true. Because grief wanted an enemy more than it wanted truth, and the Lin Kuei were close enough, familiar enough, hated enough already in the old rivalries between our clans, that it took no great effort of a sorcerer's tongue to make me believe. I did not doubt him the way a careful man doubts. I did not doubt him the way a man who loved his brothers would have doubted, would have gone to Bi-Han himself and asked, before blade, before fire, before the screaming started. I wanted my vengeance more than I wanted to know if it was righteous. That is not a lie Quan Chi told alone. That is a lie I told myself, gladly, because it let me become something with claws instead of something only capable of weeping."

His gaze lifts to hers now, and in the dark amber of his eyes something kindles, restless, ancient, older than the years he has spent trying to tame it into something resembling a man's calm gaze.

"So when you tell me the world saw that I deserved this mercy most of all, I cannot take that comfort from you the way you offer it, my love, though I know you offer it with your whole heart. Because I know what I did before Quan Chi ever laid his final, cruelest trick upon me. I know how easily I bent toward slaughter once given a reason dressed as righteousness. I became Scorpion not only because a demon whispered vengeance into a grieving man's ear, but because that grieving man was already fire waiting for a spark, already a blade look­ing for a hand cruel enough to wield it without hesitation. I gave him that hand freely, Olivia. That is the truth I do not think even you have let yourself hear plainly, because you love me too well to want it to be so. But I would rather you know the whole shape of what stands beside you than let you love only the parts of me that are easier to forgive."

A breath. Ragged. The kind a man takes when he is standing at the edge of something he has walked toward for a very long time and has finally decided not to look away from.

"You ask me not to let guilt rule me, and I try - gods know I try, for you, for the ones still living who need the man rather than the wound. And there is a difference, I have come to understand, between the grief I carry for Harumi, for Satoshi, for the Shirai Ryu who trusted me to lead them and instead followed me into a slaughter of my own making - and the fire I carry for the one who first lit the match. Grief I have learned, slowly, unevenly, painfully, to hold without it consuming me whole, the way one learns to hold a coal that has cooled enough to touch but never enough to forget it can still burn. This other thing is not grief. It does not ache and settle and return like tide, gentle in its cruelty. It burns constant, unblinking, patient as a coal buried deep in the hearth of me, and I do not think it will ever cool. Not while Quan Chi still draws breath he stole the right to keep. Not while the debt for Harumi's blood and Satoshi's small, unfinished life remains unpaid by the hand that truly owes it."

He turns his palm fully open now, as though offering her the whole of it - scar and flame and the shape of every throat that hand has opened, guilty and innocent alike, in the name of a vengeance built on a liar's foundation that he was, in the end, all too eager to believe.

"I let myself be made into his weapon, Olivia. Let. Not was. I want you to hear that word and not soften it for my sake, because I have spent too long letting others soften it for me - Raiden with his talk of curses and coercion, you with your talk of mercy and second chances, even Kuai Liang, who forgave me a debt I am not certain was his to forgive. I was grieving, yes. I was deceived, yes. But grief and deception are the soil, not the seed. The seed was mine. I chose the blade over the question. I chose to become the thing that ends lives rather than the man who might have knocked on a door and asked why his family had burned. That is a wound I put upon myself as surely as Quan Chi placed the knife in my palm and closed my fingers around the hilt. And there is only one reckoning I know how to offer in answer to a debt of that size."

Something almost gentle crosses his face then, a contradiction he does not try to smooth away, the tenderness and the wrath sitting side by side in him the way they always have, indistinguishable now, sweetness and burning drawn from the same well.

"Not peace. Not absolution - I do not think I have earned the shape of that word yet, and perhaps I never will, and I have made a fragile kind of peace with that particular unfairness. What I owe this world, what I owe Harumi and Satoshi and every Shirai Ryu who bled because their grandmaster chose fury over patience, is Quan Chi's blood spilled by this same ruined hand, slow enough that he understands, in the marrow of whatever passes for his wretched soul, exactly what his lies cost - and exactly what I allowed them to cost, because I was willing to let them."

His hand tightens around hers, not with violence, but with something fierce and certain, the only vow he seems able to give tonight beneath the chiming wind and the drifting lily blooms.

"I do not tell you this to frighten you, or to make you believe the man beside you is only wrath wearing a familiar face, though some days I fear that is closer to true than I would like to confess even to you. I tell you because you asked to know what lives in me, and this does - not as Quan Chi's curse alone, but as my own choosing, made once in grief and carried forward every day since by whatever will keeps this borrowed heart beating. It will not sleep until his breath stops sacrilegiously continuing in a world that still bears every scar of what he convinced me - so easily, so willingly - to become. Then, perhaps, only then, I will learn whether what waits after is peace, or only quiet. But I will not pretend to you, Olivia, that I believe myself deserving of the gentler word. I will only promise you that whatever I am, ruined or restored, wraith or man, I mean to spend it standing beside you until that debt is finally paid." ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

@sasorikigai (x)

Inspiration has always struck Olivia Winter in the oddest of ways.

A sudden rush while taking the bus in those early days working for the Blue Sax, pulling out any scrap of paper to scribble down lyrics so she didn't lose the words. Waking up from nap, startled by a dream, only to fumble with herself as she scrambles for her notebook or newspaper to jot down musical notes for a melody had echoed in her slumber.

Those nights at the club, taking a cigar break on a balcony, ten stories high, admiring the lights and realizing just how her heart aches for something, someone, far from this city she calls home. It is through the mundane, the ordinary routine of life itself, where Olivia finds her inspiration for many of her songs.

It was why she had decided to sit on the balcony of their apartment. To sit with the summer breeze against her, to the faint aroma of her herb garden and Hanzo's bonsai dancing together against her nose, and the warmth of the sun grazing against her sun-kissed skin to remind her just how awake the world is right now.

What Olivia hadn't expected, not since the day she had met the commander, was how much Hanzo would be a muse for her art. An artistic inspiration in the form of a man who was turned into a weapon, carrying invisible stains of gunpowder and blood on his hands, and yet still remains a gentle, encouraging and patient soul within her life.

Just as he does now. Setting aside his tea, his book of poems, and directs his attention to his songbird. Crouching before her, telling her of how he operates, of how sometimes paper and ink and pencil cannot give him the same ambition as action does. Olivia almost scoffs at Hanzo, in amusement, in that loving way she does when she knows he is right, that smallest smirk trying to curl up at the corner of her lips.

Then Hanzo does what he always does, holding his hand out to her, and Olivia's almost-smirk softens into a smile, reaching for him, her fingertips that are stained with ink curling into his hand, standing almost chest to chest with her beloved. Giving her that smile, rare and private, only for her, entirely hers, on this balcony that is adorned with pieces of both of them.

The cicadas give their long buzz into the summer wind, the way the plants around them, fern and bonsai, move slightly against the wind, the couple merely living within the home of this small private garden of theirs, as Olivia relaxes against Hanzo.

Let me be the persona. Let me be only what your music needs me to be tonight. Olivia exhales, shuddering at the way Hanzo's hand settles on the small of her back, the weight of her gentle midnight a welcoming sensation in this writer's block of hers. That now, among this small patch of nature, with the man who gives himself up to the jazz singer so that she can create this song without words, is a gift she cannot describe without expressing to him.

The small blush on her cheeks. The way her breathing hitches slightly against Hanzo. Listening, studying, loving all that Hanzo says and does to her, all in the name that she can find this song she cannot hear. Allowing her to lead in this dance that the commander has positioned them in. Beyond the scent of rosemary and basil, there comes the scent that is the commander, cedar and sandalwood, and this brings Olivia closer to her darling lover.

Her hands, stained and speckled with ink, travel where they sway on the balcony. Feeling the smile of the commander against her temple, that almost deepened laugh that escapes him, and motivation stirs within the song writer that she claims never to be. Those hands, slender fingers that will always find Hanzo in the dark of night, caress up against his torso, up to his shoulders, feeling how he man who holds her brings her closer in this action.

Hanzo wants to know where the song aches. Where the horns should swell and where the bass becomes low in that way she knows makes the body tremble from the sensation it brings. He wants her to feel the rhythm within her body and mind. To find the words, that song, in the anatomy of his form, and Olivia finds, for the first time in her life, she has never created a song through the art of the body. Hers or anyone's.

"This song, my song, I want it to... " Her hands reach higher, at the side of Hanzo's neck, fingertips, those painted nails, grazing against his skin softly. "...bring a chill down the body. Never a cold feeling. Never that. A feeling that burns the body." A melody rouses, but it only comes out in a hum from between her lips, low and honeyed. "Suffocating in a way that urges you to move."

Her hands drag down to the collar of Hanzo's shirt, only to touch, to allow the fabric that clings to him to remain, because loosening would ruin the sensation she wants to give in her song. Olivia's hum deepens, elevating slightly, and she can see how Hanzo's jaw tenses at how that smallest change in her crooning.

"But you don't want to move away from the sound. You want to move with it. To allow it to course through yer body." Hands go lower, until they are on Hanzo's forearms, and she pulls him closer so that his own hands are applying pressure to her waist, guiding his hold from her back to a spot that is thicker, firmer, and swaying against his palms. There is a faint rumble in Olivia's humming now, purring and rough around the edges, pushing out the melody smoother now against Hanzo's collar bone where she presses herself there.

"This is where the song darkens, my love, because it is when the lights become dim an' the keys on the left side of my piano become the main focus." The bass guitar is forgotten now, her mind turning to her trustworthy black piano on stage, and how this song being created through the dance and body of the commander, has become a song about the sun setting, becoming the night, and how the darkness of summer is hardly spoken of without words.

Hanzo's hum, the one he gives her in this dance, coils with hers, and it provides that low pitch that she cannot give with her voice alone. Two different sounds, two voices, becoming one with each other in this song with no lyrics, for it does not need it, and Olivia's hands grip into Hanzo's forearms, keeping him there, wishing to show that she wishes to be consumed, suffocated, by this song too.

"A golden midnight." Olivia murmurs, nodding against Hanzo with a small grin. "The title. It makes no sense, I know, but that is what this song will be called. Gold only seen, felt, at midnight." The sky has not darkened, not yet, but it's hues of blue colliding orange, becoming that beautiful indigo and blackened twilight. The cicadas stop their song, for they stop their voices once the night comes, unlike the jazz singer who hums and thrums against the commander's chest, swaying with that melody that she's designing with the surrender that Hanzo gives her. "This is where the piano softens, the tune so delicate that you might miss the little details within it, as my voice rises to fill the stage." A vocal resonance. Vibrating and bouncing in Olivia's unique way to perform wordless vocables all at once. "Where all you hear is my song fillin' yer ears an' you want to close yer eyes to be embraced by it."

💥|| He does not answer with words at first - only breath, caught and held somewhere beneath his sternum, the way a soldier holds still when a blade passes close enough to feel its wind but not its edge. Her hands are at his collar, at his neck, at the places where his pulse betrays what his face has spent a lifetime learning to conceal, and Hanzo Hasashi, commander of men who do not flinch, finds himself entirely undone by ten ink-stained fingers and a hum that will not let him go.

"Golden midnight," he repeats, low, testing the shape of it against his teeth. "Then let it live where the sun has already been." His voice roughens, drops another register, the way it does only in this garden, only for her. "Not silver. Silver is cold, distant, a thing admired from far off. You want gold - so let it be found here."

A hand lifts from her waist, guides her palm flat against his own collarbone, against skin that has spent a summer beneath open sky until it holds the color of good whiskey, of aged wood, of something warmed rather than merely lit. "Where the sun has already written its claim on me. Let your midnight rise from there. Let it climb like heat rises from stone long after the sun has gone down - the day's warmth outliving the day itself."

His eyes do not close, though hers threaten to. He watches her the way he watches a room before he enters it - reading every shift, every place where her breath catches and where it doesn't, cataloguing it not as a soldier catalogues a threat but as a man memorizing the only terrain he has ever wanted to know completely.

"You said the song must burn without being cold," he murmurs, dipping his head so his words graze her temple, her jaw, unhurried, "and I think it must ache the way muscle aches after use. Not the sharp hurt of a wound. The deep one. The good one. The one that tells you that you were alive enough, today, to feel it tomorrow."

He hums again, and this time a fragment rises with it, rough and unpolished and entirely his, offered the way a man offers something he has never given anyone else -

"Gold don't fade with the light, no - it just changes where it's kept..."

He stops himself there, almost startled by his own voice reaching for melody, and something like a laugh, low and disbelieving, escapes him against her skin. "I am no lyricist, Olivia Winter. I have never made a line worth keeping."

But her hands do not stop their slow study of him, and neither, it seems, does whatever has cracked open in his chest tonight. He hums a few bars more, circling the same low note the way a man circles a fire he isn't sure he's allowed to get close to, and then another line finds him, quieter than the first, almost reluctant to be spoken -

"Kept it in my ribs, love, kept it under my skin, in a house I built from silence, till you came and let it in..."

His jaw tightens faintly at his own words, at how easily they came once he stopped trying to command them into place. "That is the trouble with you," he says, and there's a warmth beneath the words that is not quite amusement, not quite awe, "you make even a man who plans for a living forget how to plan. I did not intend to give you verses tonight. I intended only to give you my chest to lean against." A slow exhale. "And yet."

Her fingers trace lower, along the line of his forearm, and he lets his eyes fall shut for exactly one breath - permits himself that single moment of surrender before opening them again, steady, present, hers.

"Write this down later, if it is worth keeping," he murmurs, humming the melody again beneath the words so she might catch both at once, voice and tune arriving together the way she always builds her songs. "Tell them - " a pause, searching, and then, low, certain, as if he has known the line far longer than the ten seconds since it arrived to him -

"Tell them gold ain't the color of the sun, it's the color of the hour when the sun gives up and lets the dark come..."

"That is your bridge, I think." He says it almost sheepishly, a man unused to offering something so unguarded, so entirely unarmored. "Where the horns fall away and only the low end remains. Where the piano does what you said - softens, so quiet a listener leans in without knowing why they are leaning."

The sky above them has gone the color of a bruise healing, blue giving way to violet giving way to something nameless and warm, and still Hanzo does not release her, still his hum continues beneath his own murmured verses like a current that refuses to still.

"I have led men through darkness before," he says, quieter now, the commander entirely absent from his voice, only the man remaining, "corridors with no light, buildings where every step could be the last one. I was never afraid in those moments. Fear was a luxury I could not carry." His hand at her back presses her infinitesimally closer, an admission more than a gesture. "But this - this dark, the one you are building around us with nothing but a hum and your hands on my skin - this is the first darkness that has ever made me want to stay inside it rather than find the way out."

Another line rises, softer than the rest, nearly a whisper against her temple -

"Don't need a light to find you, love, I know you by the weight you leave, by the gold you left inside me, long after you take your leave..."

He hums the closing note low, lets it fade the way dusk fades - not ending so much as dissolving into the next thing it becomes - and rests his forehead against hers, quiet now, listening for whatever she does with what he's given her. "There," he says, something almost like wonder threading through the low words. "That is all I have. The rest, Olivia Winter, I think only your voice knows how to finish." 💥||

RP Related

What first drew you to your muse?

Do you have any verses you want to write but haven't fully figured out yet?

What's your favorite icon of your muse?

How do you feel you and your muse are similar?

Are there any parts of canon that you ignore for your muse?

Is there any fanon you embrace for your muse?

Is there any fanon about your muse that you can't stand?

What's a song that reminds you of your muse?

Do you have any old muses you'd like to bring back?

What's the hardest part about writing your muse?

What's the easiest part about writing your muse?

Are there any more muses you want to play?

Do you have a preference between platonic or romantic relationships?

Personal

Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Which is worse, stepping on a lego or stubbing your toe?

Do you prefer sweet or salty flavors?

Share an interesting fact about yourself.

If you could pick an animal to freely shapeshift into, what would you pick?

Do you enjoy spicy food?

What's your favorite movie?

What's your favorite TV show?

What's your favorite video game?

How well do you handle horror?