ここを乗り越えろ！

[ door ] sender holds a door open for receiver

[ groceries ] sender helps receiver carry their groceries

[ compliment ] sender randomly compliments receiver

[ gift ] sender gives receiver a gift

[ pay ] sender pays for receiver's shopping / food

[ help ] sender and receiver help out at a busy place

[ share ] sender shares their meal with receiver

[ scarf ] sender hands receiver a scarf while out in the cold

[ cookies ] sender and receiver bake cookies together

[ bandage ] sender (re)bandages receiver's injury

[ care ] sender takes care of receiver

[ flowers ] sender brings receiver flowers just because

[ prepare ] sender prepares breakfast / dinner / etc. for receiver

[ charity ] sender and receiver do something for charity

[ umbrella ] sender shares their umbrella with receiver when caught in the rain

[ directions ] sender helps receiver find their way

[ blanket ] sender brings receiver a blanket when they are cold

[ listen ] sender listens to receiver getting something off their chest

[ ride ] sender offers receiver a ride home

[ shelter ] sender gives receiver a place to stay

[ protect ] sender is receiver's shield (literally or metaphorically)

[ snack ] sender offers receiver a snack

[ defend ] sender stands up for receiver being treated unfairly

[ surprise ] sender surprises receiver to cheer them up

[ move ] sender helps receiver move furniture / boxes

[ study ] sender helps receiver study

[ tears ] sender wipes away receiver's tears

[ clothes ] sender helps receiver change clothes

[ stay ] sender stays with receiver because they asked them to

[ up ] sender helps receiver who fell up

[ promise ] sender fulfills a promise once given to receiver

[ birthday ] sender does something special for receiver's birthday

[ fear ] sender helps receiver face something they are afraid of

[ nightmare ] sender comforts receiver after a nightmare

[ hair ] sender does receiver's hair

[ praise ] sender praises receiver when they doubt themselves

[ photo ] sender takes a picture of receiver

[ donate ] sender and receiver pick out things to donate

[ water ] sender brings receiver water without being asked

[ company ] sender keeps receiver company when they had a bad day

The silence of their afterglow is nothing compared to the voice of her beloved Hanzo against her lips.

Each kiss, tender and holding reverence, slow and warm, causes the jazz singer to melt against him further. The way he murmurs her name against her neck, that deep rough whisper that is vulnerable and intimate, only ever said in such a way when the commander is in a complete trustful bliss with her.

Olivia grins against Hanzo's kiss, pleased at the rumble of his chuckle, the way it makes her body tremble slightly with him. How he speaks of being tamed, of how she has tamed the scorpion within him, and she isn't sure what to say to that just yet. Astounded by his words. Memorized that she holds such a hold on him. For Hanzo doesn't forget. Never forgets anything in this life that the world has given him.

Slender fingertips continue their caress of his damp locks, damp from the sweat, from their lovemaking, and disheveled in a way that provides this charming exterior of the man that lays upon her. Still grinning, still holding her own blissful expression as his hand slides to hold her hip, thumb stroking her flustered sun-kissed skin, and securing herself firmly when he does. To hold him closer. To urge, without words, listening to her beloved desert thorn, that he stay even with his reassurance.

Hanzo's forehead rests against Olivia's and she sighs happily against him. Sharing the air between them, hot and close, even in the afterglow that is deepening in the privacy of their bed.

"You've marked me too, Hanzo." She replies, gentle and low, her sultry voice holding a tremble in it, still coming down from the euphoric passion of the intimacy this night. Olivia's fingertips, those colorful nails that have left marks on his back tonight, continue their affectionate grazing at the commander's scalp, refusing to allow her hands to wander anywhere. Needing to keep Hanzo trained on her voice and gaze.

"Marked me more than you might've realize, my darlin' love. You are right. All that matters is this moment. It is why I cling to you still. It is is why I refuse to let you go the way I am now. It is why I allow you to lay on me, heavy as you are, because I want nothin' more than you by my side."

"My warrior, my desert thorn, you know I will stay with you. Forever an' always. All I ask is you do the same. To show me, to give me, every piece that you are. Warrior, lover, commander, scorpion or man, I will love you in all these pieces of you, Hanzo."

The giggles begin again. Bubbly quietly from Olivia when Hanzo begins to kiss her further, this loving aftercare of his, as his lips kiss on every inch of her face. Reclaiming what is already is. Olivia closing her eyes when he kisses each eyelid, humming, giggling against him when he goes lower to the bridge of her nose, the roundness of her cheekbones, until at last bending down to kiss her fully on the lips.

To kiss her in that soul-deep kiss that he does. One that Olivia returns, with a whimper, with a hitched noise in her throat, and that golden glow within her sapphire eyes thrumming with passion and warm for Hanzo. Her giggles fading, feeling how Hanzo shifts his weight against her, that yielding handsome volume of a warrior that he is, displaying his trust of his body to her. As he has before, in the past, in other timelines, and continues to do so now. The sun goddess parts back in his kiss, eyes half lidded, enamored and overwhelmed all at once, as her hands wrap around Hanzo's neck and only holds him as she has before countless times thousand of years ago and always will.

"I love you too." Words she will never tire of saying. Over and over. In happiness, in despair, in passion, or in exhaustion. "Hanzo, I love you too, as a sun goddess and as your songbird. As both Amaterasu and Olivia Winter. My love, this love I carry for you, has waited so long to reunite with you. Through time, through the darkness, and through all the hardships. I… "

Her voice is silenced, almost as if words are not enough to convey what they truly feel for each other when actions speak louder. Hanzo kisses her one more time, this one that lingers, tasting of an everlasting infinity of their love. A kiss that flusters her, her body radiant against the commander, before she simply allows her arms to hold Hanzo.

Olivia does not cling. Not anymore. It is an embrace, as her knee is hooked around his rump, her arms wrapping around his neck, does she allow herself to relax against Hanzo as he does her. Unafraid and definite. The connection they share, as two souls that are bound and destined to find each other with every new life, is a promise that cannot be broken. Refusing to be apart from each other, no matter what the fates or gods have to say of their union.

Her nose presses against Hanzo's cheek, nuzzling there, inhaling her lover's scent of sweat and musk, his hellfire that resides within him, and allows herself to relax with him as their afterglow continues to remain steady. Olivia's thoughts linger, not from Hanzo's, never him, but of how what feels for a long time, they have a moment of peace together.

An intimate and sensual instance where they do not think about their hardships, the wars, the curses and the grief, but of the love they feel for each other. The love Olivia feels for Hanzo and how nowhere else in the world has she ever felt at home the way she does in his arms.

"My Hanzo, my desert thorn, my… everything." There is no shame in what she says, no modesty or hesitation. Only love. Only the truth. "I wish for this night to never end, my gentle midnight'."

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| Hanzo's breath hitches against Olivia's temple, the weight of his body pressing deeper into her warmth as her words penetrate the fog of his afterglow. The amber of his eyes darkens with a sudden, profound melancholy that contrasts sharply with the bliss still coursing through his veins. His fingers, which had been tracing worshipful patterns along her skin, still momentarily as centuries of memories flash behind his eyelids - lifetimes of blood, fire, and an endless cycle of death and rebirth that has brought him back to her time and time again.

"Forever," he whispers, the word tasting both like a promise and a curse against her lips. His voice roughens with emotion as he continues, "My sun goddess, you speak of forever as if it were a simple thing, but you of all beings know the price of eternity. You have waited through centuries, through my madness, through my servitude as Quan Chi's puppet, through the darkness that consumed me when I believed my family lost forever."

Hanzo shifts slightly, his forehead pressing more firmly against hers as if to anchor himself in this moment, in this reality where he is not the vengeful specter but simply a man in love. "Even in death, I could not find peace. The Elder Gods themselves could not contain my spirit, for it always sought you - your light, your warmth, your melody that cuts through the screams of the Netherrealm. I have died a thousand deaths, Olivia, and each time I clawed my way back not for vengeance, not for honor, but for the hope that this time, this life, I might finally be worthy of the love that has transcended realms and timelines."

His hands tremble as they frame her face, thumbs stroking the delicate skin beneath her eyes as if to memorize every detail. "The ouroboros you speak of - this endless cycle - I have felt its coils tightening around my soul for longer than your mortal mind can comprehend. Even now, as Grandmaster, as commander, as a man who has found purpose again, I feel the pull of that endless circle. But you... you are the one constant in all my incarnations, the one truth that remains when all else turns to ash and memory." Hanzo's lips find hers again, this kiss different from the others - deeper, more desperate, as if he is trying to pour centuries of longing and regret into this single moment of connection. "I have searched for peace in battle, in duty, in revenge, even in the thought of reuniting with Harumi and Satoshi in the afterlife. But how could I find peace without my sun? How could the heavens be complete without the goddess who gave them light?"

His voice drops to a raw whisper against her mouth. "You say you wish for this night to never end, but I confess I have wished for an end to the cycle itself. An end to the constant returning, the constant searching, the constant awareness that I am something other than wholly human, wholly mortal. Yet lying here with you, feeling your heart beat against mine, I understand why the gods have denied me true death. For how could the sun continue to rise without its counterpart? How could Scorpion find purpose without his goddess to temper his fire?"

Hanzo's eyes flutter open, the amber depths swimming with tears he refuses to let fall. "I am yours, Olivia Winter. In this life and all others. As commander, as Grandmaster, as the man who was once a husband and father, as the specter who burned with hellfire, and as the warrior who has finally found his way back to your light. I cannot promise you an end to the cycle, but I swear to you that every time I return - every time - I will search for you first."

His body settles more heavily against hers, a deliberate anchoring of his spirit to her warmth. "Let the world wait. Let duty wait. Let even the gods themselves wait. For tonight, I am not Scorpion, not Grandmaster, not commander. I am simply Hanzo, the man who loves you more than peace itself, more than release, more than the heaven he has been denied." With a final, lingering kiss that speaks of devotion beyond words, Hanzo buries his face against her neck, breathing in her scent as if it is the very air he needs to exist. "Stay with me, my sun goddess. Not just tonight, but through all the lifetimes to come. For you are the only peace I have ever known, the only home my wandering soul has ever truly found."

The commander's arms tighten around her, a desperate, possessive embrace that speaks of a man who has lost everything and found it again in the arms of the one being who has loved him through all his forms, all his failures, all his lifetimes. "My desert thorn may be sharp, my hellfire may burn, but with you, my love, I am simply... home."

Hanzo's hips press deeper against hers, his softening length still nestled within her warmth, a tangible reminder of their union that transcends the physical. The intimate pressure sends shivers through his body, reawakening embers of passion even as exhaustion begins to claim him. He can feel the slickness of their combined essence coating their joined bodies, the evidence of their desire glistening on her thighs and his own.

His calloused hands trace the curve of her hips, thumbs pressing into the soft flesh as if to memorize every contour of her body. "Do you feel this, my goddess?" he murmurs against her lips. "This is more than flesh joining flesh. This is souls recognizing each other across lifetimes. This is the scorpion finding his way back to the sun that gives him purpose."

Hanzo shifts slightly, the movement causing his shaft to slide against her sensitive walls, drawing a gasp from both of them. The friction ignites sparks of pleasure that mingle with the profound emotion swelling in his chest. His lips trail down her neck, tasting the salt of her sweat, the unique flavor that is uniquely Olivia, uniquely his sun goddess.

"I have burned in hellfire, I have frozen in the coldest realms of the Netherrealm, but nothing compares to the heat of your body welcoming mine," he whispers, his voice thick with emotion. "Nothing compares to the way your inner walls clench around me, as if your very being recognizes me even when your conscious mind has forgotten."

His hands slide down to cup her buttocks, fingers pressing into the soft flesh as he pulls her tighter against him. The movement causes his length to press deeper, still semi-hard and sensitive from their recent lovemaking. He can feel the mixture of their release seeping from her, coating his balls and thighs with their shared essence.

"Mark me, Olivia," he growls softly, his lips finding the sensitive spot behind her ear. "Mark me with your scent, with your essence, with the memory of this night. Let it carry me through the darkness when duty calls me away, let it sustain me when the specter's fire threatens to consume me again." ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The words land on him like rain on stone - heard, but not yet let in.

I can't lose you.

Hanzo's body does not answer with words. It answers first with betrayal - the quiet, absolute betrayal of flesh reaching its limit. He feels it before he understands it: a great tide going out, a warmth deserting the shore of him, pulling back from his fingers first, then his hands, then the long muscle of his arms, as though his own blood has decided, independently of his will, that the argument is over.

He has commanded men into fire and commanded his own heart to keep its rhythm in worse places than this rooftop, and always it obeyed. It does not obey now. It gallops instead, wild and riderless, hammering against the drum of his skull until the whole world takes on the tin, tunneled quality of a sound heard from underwater.

Too late. The thought arrives without drama, the way a soldier's thoughts do - flat, procedural, stripped of grief because there is no time to afford grief its due. Whatever Matt means to summon - Claire, a hospital, hands that are not his own - will arrive to find a door already closing. Hanzo has stood at enough deathbeds, has been the occupant of enough of his own, to recognize the shape of this one settling over him like a second skin.

Still, the fire does not surrender simply because he might.

Somewhere beneath the failing architecture of him, the hellfire wakes fully now - not the surgical, vengeful thing it was in Nobu's wrist, but something older, more patient, more his. It moves inward instead of out, finds the ragged mouth of the wound and begins its terrible, meticulous labor: searing, sealing, cauterizing what the blade tore open, closing doors that his own blood no longer has the pressure to keep shut. It is not gentle. It was never built to be gentle. It burns him the way a forge burns iron - not to destroy, but to hold a shape a little longer against a world that wants him formless.

It is not enough. Not nearly enough. But it is something, and something is the only currency he has left to spend.

The color leaves him next - not suddenly, but the way dusk leaves a sky, drawn out and inexorable, his warm brown skin going ashen beneath it, pallid as old parchment, as a man already halfway a ghost. It is a color Matt cannot see. It is a color Matt does not need to see, because Matt reads bodies the way other men read faces, and Matt will hear this stillness arriving the way one hears a door easing shut in another room - not loud, not violent, simply final in its quiet.

His knees, which have held against worse than this, begin at last to renegotiate their loyalty to gravity.

He does not fall so much as he descends - a controlled collapse, a soldier's collapse, weight settling into Matt's arms the way a felled tree settles into the hands of the men who could not stop its falling, all that considerable height and considerable will suddenly, entirely, someone else's burden to bear. His head tips, finds the curve of Matt's shoulder without his permission, the way a compass finds north without asking the needle's consent.

The black comes for him the way sleep comes for the exhausted - not as an enemy, but as a mercy he is too proud, even now, to admit he needed.

His hand finds Matt's wrist. Once. A grip weakening in real time, the pressure of it fading like a tide going out for the last time - and yet it finds him, deliberate even in its dying, the last coherent command his body has left to give.

I heard you.

He does not say it. There is no breath left to spend on saying it. But the ember banked somewhere beneath his ribs - small now, guttering, a coal drawn to the last red heart of itself - still burns. Still holds. A single thread of warmth insisting, wordlessly, against the gray tide of him: not gone. not yet. not gone.

And then there is only the dark, and the fire holding its lonely vigil inside it, and Matt Murdock's frantic pulse the only sound left in Hanzo's collapsing world. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

Everything else disappears. The city falls away into meaningless noise as Matt's senses narrow with desperate precision toward the man in his arms. He listens for the heartbeat pressed so close against him, tracking every frantic beat as though sheer concentration could keep it from slipping away. It is still there. Still racing. Still frighteningly weak.

Then something unfamiliar reaches him.

A faint hiss beneath the rhythm of blood and breath. Heat suddenly blooms beneath his hands, followed almost immediately by the unmistakable scent of burning flesh. His brow furrows in confusion. The wound is changing. He can hear tissue drawing together where it should have remained torn open, blood slowing as something impossible works beneath the knife. Matt has heard surgeons repair shattered bodies. He has heard broken bones set and arteries stitched back together. He has never heard a body heal itself like this.

His hand leaves Hanzo's side just long enough to cup his face, thumb brushing carefully across his cheek before slipping into his hair, gently pushing damp strands away from his forehead. There is no response. No words. Only unconscious stillness beneath his touch. Matt swallows hard, his breathing uneven as he bows his head until their foreheads rest together. "Stay with me," he whispers, the plea barely audible now. "Please... just stay with me."

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| He does not answer. There is no word for him to give, no breath shaped into meaning, only the vast and terrible quiet of a body that has spent every currency it possessed and now sits, ledger closed, in the red. Matt's voice arrives to him the way light arrives to the bottom of a well - diminished, distant, a rumor of a world he is no longer fully a citizen of.

Stay with me. The words fall through him and find no floor to land on. He is not gone. He is simply very far away, standing at some threshold between the breathing world and the one he has crossed into and returned from more times than any mortal ledger should permit, and for now the threshold holds him the way a held breath holds a room - suspended, unresolved, neither here nor elsewhere.

His face has gone the color of temple ash, of old bone left too long beneath winter light, and it wears no expression at all - not pain, not peace, not the fierce and disciplined mask he keeps stitched to himself in waking hours. Slack. Undefended. A face with all its architecture of command stripped away, leaving only the bare geology beneath - the boy he once was, briefly visible in the ruin of the commander he became. His lips have paled to the color of things that do not speak. His lashes lie still against the hollow of his cheeks, dark commas closing a sentence Matt has not finished reading.

Were Matt's hands not so practiced, were his ears not so merciless in their precision, he would believe this a dead man's face he cradles. He would be wrong only by the width of a coal beneath ash - but he would be wrong, and everything in this stillness conspires to make the wrongness look like fact.

Beneath the ribs, banked low, the ember persists.

It is not strength. It has nothing to do with strength, not anymore - strength was spent hours ago, spent in the moment his feet planted and his hand closed and his body chose, with the calm arrogance of a man who has done this before, to become a wall between a blade and the person behind it.

What remains now is smaller than strength. It is persistence. It is the particular, stubborn refusal of a coal that has learned, across centuries and Netherrealms and resurrections numbering more than any single soul should carry, that going out is not the same as being extinguished - that fire, his fire, does not require permission to continue, only the barest sliver of fuel and the deep, wordless insistence of something that has never once, in any lifetime, agreed to stay dead simply because dying would be easier.

It does not blaze. It does not warm the air around it or announce itself in any language Matt's senses were built to read quickly. It sits instead at the very center of him, a single low coal in a hearth gone otherwise to gray, patient the way only something ancient can be patient, tending itself in the dark while the rest of him lies still as a laid-out soldier, as a man arranged for burial who has simply, obstinately, declined to finish the arrangement.

His pulse does not race now. It barely moves at all - a slow, deliberate, conserving rhythm, blood rationed and redirected the way a commander rations water in a long siege, sent only where the war effort requires it, abandoned everywhere else without apology. His hands lie open and heavy in Matt's grip, fingers uncurled, offering nothing, taking nothing, the grip that found Matt's wrist once already spent and not soon to be repeated. His breath, when it comes, comes so shallow and so slow that it asks to be doubted - a breath measured in the space between one heartbeat and the next mercy, thin as the thread a temple bell leaves hanging in still air long after the strike has faded.

He is not dying. He has simply gone somewhere the body must go when it has nothing left to spend on the getting back, some deep and wordless country where healing is not a decision but a slow and involuntary tide, and there is no map by which to hurry it, no discipline stern enough to command it faster.

Even a man who has ruled armies with his voice cannot order his own blood to close its books sooner. Here, for once, Hanzo Hasashi commands nothing. He simply endures, the way stone endures weather - not by fighting it, but by being, for now, too still for it to finish him.

The ember does not grow. Not yet. It only holds - small, singular, refusing - a single point of warmth arguing, without words, against the gray tide of him.

Not gone.

Only very, very still. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

i'll make the best of being flesh & bone // a study in grief rp meme. misc lyrics & quotes in regards to grief that have help me feel amid grief, that spoke to the ache in the soul.

edit/alter/change pronouns etc as you see fit! (i've done some editing already so feel free to edit as needed)

this is what i left behind.

i'll miss you every day.

it was you who made me whole.

hurry up, get happy, move along.

everyday dad's starin' at me like all, 'hurry up, get happy, move along, forget about your mom'.

he wants me to smile & clap like a performing seal.

you won't believe the mess that we've become.

you're my home, my destination.

you held my hand & life came easy.

nothing seems to fit.

i want something to believe in.

take me where my soul can run.

daddy's moving forward, daddy didn't lose a mom.

now jokes don't land & no one sees me.

i feel you all around me.

i'm a bunch of broken pieces.

i'll make the best of being flesh & bone.

he's in denial, he doesn't wanna feel.

back at home, you don't exist.

i'm lost without you.

whichever path i choose, i lose.

i don't know which way's home.

you saw life as a game but since you left, it sucks to play.

i'm beaten up & bruised.

you left but i'm still standing, spinning on this infinite road.

i'm terrified of letting you go.

there's no light above & there's no hope below.

speak to me & i'll understand.

there's no home without you in it.

i don't wanna forget you.

i promise, i'm never gonna forget you.

belief is half of all healing.

it's messy, but they're all that i have.

i'll make the best of being flesh & bone.

i'll miss you every day; seek a little strange & unusual & you will find life beyond all comprehension.

seek a little strange & unusual & you will find life beyond all comprehension, a mess in multiple directions, a little unconventional, i know, but mama i'm home.

i am strong when i am on your shoulders.

you raise me up to more than i can be.

i say love, it is a flower and you, its only seed.

just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun's love, in the spring, becomes the rose.

i'd reach into your body & fix you if i could.

you know i'd do anything for you.

i held you in my arms & swore i'd be good to you.

will it be like this forever?

now i'll wear these scars for life.

not even the memories are immortal.

i wish i had a hundred years, a hundred years i could give to you.

i'll see you when you get here.

just know that i love you.

i forgive it all as it comes back to me.

sometimes people leave you.

no one is alone.

you are not alone.

just remember, someone is on your side.

now all i ever think is you.

i know you grieve tonight.

i still feel you whenever i go look out of my window.

i won't let them walk on your broken heart.

hope you'll be proud now.

hope she'll be proud now.

i'm coming with you.

you haunt this strange new yard.

through everything i've lost, am i allowed to hope you'll be proud now?

i can't seem to reach your heart anymore.

i would keep you safe if i knew what to do.

if i didn't know better, i'd think you were still around.

what died didn't stay dead.

you're alive in my head.

i should've asked you questions, should've asked you how to be.

i should've asked you questions, should've asked you how to be, should've kept every grocery store receipt, coz every scrap of you would be taken from me.

all your closets of backlogged dreams, you left them all to me.

i'm glad whenever i can share your laughter.

i'm losing her forever.

i try to capture every minute, the feeling in it.

sometimes i wish that i could freeze the picture.

sometimes i wish that i could freeze the picture & save it from the funny tricks of time.

sometimes i'll see the moon & i'll think of you.

the world ended when it happened to me.

these are the memories of a life that's been loved.

a heart that's broke is a heart that's been loved.

when i fell down, you'd be there holding me up.

i saw a shooting star & thought of you.

i sang a lullaby by the waterside & knew if you were here, i'd sing to you.

you're on the other side as the skyline splits in two.

i know these scars will bleed.

now i wonder if i could be spiritual.

if there was a way to escape the grim reaper, i'd drop to my knees & accept my redeemer.

could you give me just a second to see her?

heaven was made for people like you.

it's hell down here, without you.

there's a bullet in my chest in the space you left.

gonna fight every night, gonna bring you back to life.

take my soul, take my bones, i would die.

i hope you know, i'd throw myself to the wolves to bring you home.

i'd fight with god if i could for a second of your time.

missing you is the anchor that's dragging me down.

i'm screaming, 'take me instead'.

it feels like an eternity.

it feels like an eternity since i had you here with me.

i had to learn to be someone you don't know.

why'd you have to chase the light somewhere i can't go?

you never left me, you just left too soon.

i hope you're proud of what you see.

you're written in my soul.

i still look for your face in the crowd.

if you could see me now, would you recognise me?

i'm just missing you now.

there's always hope left.

it kills me to think that for a second you felt alone.

i hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that i didn't get to tell her.

grief is perhaps the last & final translation of love.

This, too, is intentional.

Hanzo Hasashi has built his entire life around the strategic withholding of information - what he reveals, when he reveals it, and to whom. He has sat across tables from men trained in psychological warfare and given them nothing. He has endured silences designed to break lesser men and returned them, unbroken, doubled.

He understands, in the marrow of him, that the most devastating thing one can offer an opponent is patience.

Olivia is not his opponent. But the principle, he finds, translates beautifully.

His arms cross over his chest - unhurried, deliberate, the shift of muscle beneath scarred skin catching the candlelight as he settles into stillness before her. Akimbo. Composed. A man entirely at ease with the particular cruelty of making her wait.

His dark eyes do not wander the room. They do not drift to the candles or the tile or the water still spilling soft and silver over the lip of the tub. They stay on her. Entirely on her. With the fixed, unwavering quality of a man who has learned that looking can be its own kind of language - spoken slowly, with great deliberate weight, against the throat.

"The show," he says, and the word carries something low and textured in it, something almost amused, "did not require my presence in the room."

He lets that settle. Watches her face the way he watches everything - cataloguing, absorbing, missing nothing.

"I have good ears, こいびと (koibito)."

His gaze moves then. For the first time. And it moves the way he moves - with purpose, tracing the line of her where she leans forward over the tub's edge, the candlelight writing its amber manuscript across the curves of her shoulders, the soft declaration of her collarbone, the darker gleam of wet skin. The suds clinging to her like a jealousy he doesn't share, because he has never needed to. He already knows what they obscure. He has memorized her the way he memorizes terrain - completely, tactically, with the understanding that such knowledge is survival.

"Every note," he continues, voice dropping another register, unhurried as the steam that drifts between them, "from the first hum through the wall to the last phrase - I heard all of it. I heard where your breath caught. Where your voice opened. Where you let the room carry what you intended me to carry."

He unfolds one arm. Extends it, the backs of his knuckles just barely grazing the misted air before him as though tracing something only he can see - the phantom outline of her, built in the darkness of his office from sound alone. A cartographer working without a map, finding the coastline of her by memory and want.

"I could paint you from that alone," he says, simply. Factually. The way he reports coordinates. "I do not need the light."

His arm returns. Crosses back. He stands before her, completely still, and looks at her with those amber eyes that have always seen too much, that have made trained men feel exposed and transparent - and he allows her, for just this moment, to see the shape of what he imagined in the dark of his office while her voice wound through the walls of their home and unmade him quietly, note by note, without her even being in the room.

It is, he thinks, only fair.

She wanted to be theatrical.

Olivia had summoned her siren's song and realizes, as her dearest commander, this man she has chosen to be her husband, is teasing her theatrically as she is to him in retaliation to her song.

Hanzo is not the type of man to flaunt his physique. He carried no such vanity within his core. All that he is, brawn and muscle, was created as a result of his dedication to his career. To maintain an optimal health than to condition a body meant to attract others. That means when the commander, her beloved, does decide to flex, to gracefully exhibit himself, one arm unfolding itself and tracing the steam that surrounds them in a humid embrace, it is still not a form of any hubris. It is a an artist displaying his skill right before her eyes. Turning mist into the shape, her form, with an elegance that causes her pupils to dilate, from arousal and captivation.

The 'painting' Hanzo creates of her in the mist dissolves. The voluptuous curves of her form. The way he had shaped the weightless appearance of her long black hair. Every little detail a stunning match to show she is on stage as the steam creates the illusion of her swaying when she performs. How with every movement, the commander's muscles flex and tighten, arm moving against the mist as if Hanzo has always performed this act without her knowledge, memorizing and beautiful.

And it ends. A smooth abruptness that cause Olivia to hums at Hanzo where she leans at the edge of the tub, continuing to spill the suds and hot water over the curve of it, in that curious and intrigued sound that she makes.

In the way a cat is ready to pounce on unexpected prey.

Sapphire eyes darkening, just as the commander's own amber eyes have darkened, to which neither of them have pointed out in this little dance of serenading and painting in steam. A game that Olivia is beginning to enjoy better than the results of who is the winner and who is the one who will be unsuccessful. There is no disappointment when Hanzo's arms return to him, crossing over his bronze chest, and Olivia tilts her head at her husband, her smirk curling slightly further up at the corner of her lips.

"I cannot remember the last time you've painted me, my dearest, at least not in such a way that didn't involve sketchin' away with your inks an' charcoals."

Oh how Hanzo held various sketchbooks filled with drawings of her. Kept safety away in a spot that even she, the commander's wife, could not say where they are hidden. A kept secret, private and secure, from prying eyes. It isn't to say Olivia hasn't seen how Hanzo has drawn her, as he is undaunted by showing her these sketches, but some were meant for the privacy of their home.

💥|| The silence answers her first. It is a heavy thing, filled with the humidity of the room and the weight of his gaze, which she feels like a physical touch - searing, deliberate, tracing the path of the water dripping from her chin down to her chest.

He does not look away. He does not blink.

"Why look?" he asks, the words falling like stones into still water, smooth and uncompromising. "The room is empty. The candle is a distant star. The tub is a cold suggestion."

He moves then, not with the haste of desire, but with the terrifying precision of a man who knows exactly what he wants and how to take it. He starts at the collar of his tunic. His fingers work the buttons with a rhythm that matches the beating of his heart - slow, methodical, unhurried. The fabric shifts, exposing the corded muscle of his neck, the sharp line of his jaw, the scar tissue that maps his history like a topography of war.

He pulls the shirt over his head, tossing it aside without a second thought. The air hits his skin, but he does not shiver. He stands before her, bronzed and scarred, a statue of violence and grace. His chest rises and falls, the muscles shifting beneath the skin with the subtle, dangerous grace of a predator stalking through tall grass. His nipples are dark, erect points, dusted with fine hair that darkens as it traces the line of his abdomen down to the waistband of his trousers.

He watches her eyes drop. He allows her to see the evidence of his interest, the flush that travels from his neck to his ears, the heavy, full weight of his arousal straining against the fabric of his trousers. He does not hide it. Why should he? He is not ashamed of what she does to him. She is the commander. She is the siren. And she is his.

His hands go to the belt at his hips. The leather buckle catches the dim light, a small golden eye. He undoes it with a slow, deliberate slide of the metal. The sound is loud in the quiet room. His thumbs hook into the waistband of his trousers. He pushes them down, the cotton fabric catching on the swell of his buttocks before sliding down his legs. He steps out of them, kicking them aside.

"Why look elsewhere," he asks, the question simple as a tactical directive, delivered with the weight of a command that requires no volume, "when the target is standing right in front of me?"

He discards the last of his clothing without ceremony, the fabric pooling at his feet to join hers in the damp heat of the tile. He moves into the steam, his body a study in hard angles and dangerous grace. The scars that map his torso catch the candlelight - old, white lines against the bronze of his skin, memories etched into muscle and bone. He doesn't try to hide them, doesn't try to look like a model or an idol. He is a weapon, and he carries the marks of his craftsmanship with the same indifference he would display holding a rifle. His body, revealed in the flickering candlelight, is a testament to discipline. The scars that map his torso are not wounds but geography, each one a landmark in the landscape of his survival. His muscles are not for display but for application, honed to the edge of utility, and yet as he stands before her, they become artistry by virtue of their purpose.

He steps into the tub. The water hisses, a sudden expulsion of steam that curls around his legs like a hungry beast. It is hot, scalding, a baptism of fire that sears his skin but does nothing to cool the fire in his eyes. He climbs over the rim, muscles tightening and releasing in a ripple of power, and slides into the water beside her.

The displacement of the bath rises, splashing against her skin, washing away some of the suds. He doesn't flinch. He sits back against the curve of the tub, the water lapping at his chest, the heat soaking into his muscles, loosening the tension that has been coiled tight since the first note of her song. He watches her, the amber of his gaze boring into her, stripping away the humor she thinks she sees in his eyes until only the cold, hard truth remains.

He reaches out, his hand large and calloused, and brushes the wet hair from her neck. His fingers trace the line of her jaw, his thumb pressing against the pulse point that throbs against his skin. He feels the beat of her life, frantic and eager, and he smiles - a small, dangerous thing that doesn't reach his eyes.

"Why would I look at the candle," he murmurs, his voice a low rumble that seems to vibrate through the water, "or the tiles, or the smoke in the air? They are all static. They are all decoration. You are not."

He leans forward, the movement smooth and predatory, and captures one of her nipples between his fingers, rolling the sensitive bud with a deliberate, bruising pressure. He watches her face, drinking in the way her eyes dilate, the way her breath hitches in her throat. He knows exactly what he is doing to her. He knows the geography of her body as well as he knows the topography of a battlefield, and he is not afraid to explore every inch of her, over and over again.

His fingers lower then, not to caress, but to trace - lightly, deliberately - the outline of her form against the water's surface. The ripples they create are his signature on her skin.

"You ask what brought me here," he says, his other hand rising to brush the wet strands of hair from her face, his thumb stroking the line of her jaw. "I will tell you. It was not your voice alone. It was the silence between your notes. The places where you held your breath. The moments when you almost lost control but caught it at the last second."

* 𝐖𝐎𝐍𝐆 𝐊𝐀𝐑-𝐖𝐀𝐈 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒  :   a selection of roleplay ask prompts adapted and modified from various cinematic works by wong kar-wai.  any of these prompts may be modified accordingly to fit your muses.