lost x dreams

The candle she lit between the dishes throws amber light across the surfaces of everything they made - the stew still fragrant with lamb and the deep earthen warmth of root vegetables that have surrendered themselves fully to heat, the pasta pale and gleaming under its white mantle, the grilled fish resting in the composed dignity of something prepared with the specific attention of a man who remembers, without knowing precisely how he remembers, that she has always preferred her fish this way. The onigiri arranged with the unconscious precision of hands that once made dozens of these for men who would carry them into training and emerge hours later still warm.

He looks at all of it.

Then he looks at her.

And then - because he is who he is, because the mind of a commander does not cease its operations simply because the immediate context is candlelight and stir-fry and the particular domestic intimacy of a kitchen emptied of everything except the evidence of a shared labor and the quiet of an hour that belongs entirely to them - he thinks about what he has promised.

Not with anxiety. Not with the quality of a man second-guessing the weight of his own words in the aftermath of speaking them, turning them over in search of the flaw in their construction, the place where commitment exceeded capacity. He has examined that possibility already, in the deep and methodical way he examines everything that matters, and has found it without structural weakness.

The promise is sound. The promise will hold. What he engages in now, sitting across from her with his hands wrapped around a teacup and the bond between them settled into the low steady pulse of something that has moved past revelation into the quieter country of simply being - what he engages in now is something more precise than doubt and more useful than reassurance.

Preparation.

The commander descending.

He has been here before. Will always be here before - in this specific internal territory that precedes action the way dawn precedes light, the way the body draws breath before the order is given, the way the quality of silence in a compound changes in the hours before something significant arrives and the men who have learned to read that silence begin, without instruction, to sharpen what needs sharpening and check what needs checking. The mind going to work in the space that the body is being provisioned, using the time that the table and the food and her presence have purchased with the specific efficiency of a man who has never once in his adult life permitted a waiting moment to remain unoccupied.

Something made rather than born.

He returns to this. To the intelligence she offered him through the language of a dream that carried more tactical information than she perhaps understands it did - the ruby scales that suggested deliberate construction, the ember pupils that held no animal recognition and no divine intention and nothing at all that resembled the functional soul of a creature that arrived in the world through any natural process.

The trails of darkness left across the floor of her cavern like a signature, like a territorial marker, like the specific and deliberate announcement of something that understood it was occupying space that belonged to another and had been directed to occupy it anyway. To wait. To corrupt simply by being present in the way that certain things corrupt by proximity alone - not through active destruction but through the slower and more insidious mechanism of wrongness seeping into sacred architecture the way water finds its way through stone, patient and inevitable and utterly without mercy toward what it is unmaking.

He thinks about that patience.

A creature that waits does not wait by accident. Does not wait by instinct in the way that natural predators wait - coiled in the architecture of their hunger, operating from the deep grammar of survival that requires no external direction. What she described waited with the specific quality of something that had been instructed to wait. That understood the parameters of its purpose - guard this space, corrupt this ground, ensure that when she returns for what she left behind, she finds something in that darkness that should not be there, something wrong enough to announce itself before she can protect herself from the announcement.

A trap.

Designed with knowledge.

This is what the commander cannot set aside, cannot file into the category of problems to be addressed after he has descended and returned and the immediate threat has been removed with the direct and permanent efficiency he brings to threats that have made the error of positioning themselves between him and what he protects. The trap implies an architect. Implies someone with sufficient intelligence about her - about the cavern's existence, about the nature of what it contains, about the specific vulnerability of a sun goddess in a mortal vessel who cannot simply descend into her own sacred dark and cleanse what has taken root there by force of divine will alone - to construct something precisely calibrated to that vulnerability. Not a broad instrument. Not a crude deployment of malevolent power aimed in a general direction and permitted to find its own target.

Something specific.

He thinks about what specific means in this context. Thinks about it with the cold and unhurried attention of a man who has spent decades building tactical intelligence from the raw material of threat assessment, who learned early that the most dangerous adversaries are not the strongest but the most informed - the ones who have done their reconnaissance before they have done anything else, who understand that knowledge of a target's vulnerabilities is worth more in a conflict's opening hours than any accumulation of raw power brought to bear without the precision that intelligence provides.

Someone has done their reconnaissance.

The thought arrives not with the quality of alarm - alarm is an inefficient response to information, a luxury that consumes resources better directed toward analysis and action - but with the flat and absolute recognition of a man updating his threat model in real time, incorporating new data into the existing architecture of what he knows and adjusting his operational parameters accordingly. Whatever he will find in that cavern is not the full accounting of what has moved against her. It is the announcement. The opening gesture of something that has been patient enough to place a piece on the board and wait, and the thing about adversaries who are patient enough to wait is that they are also patient enough to have prepared for the response.

He will need to be better than prepared.

He thinks about the hellfire.

Not with pride - pride is a structural flaw in tactical thinking, a crack in the foundation of sound judgment that announces itself most catastrophically in exactly the kind of engagement where it can least be afforded. He thinks about it with the same dispassionate precision that a craftsman thinks about the specific capabilities of the tool he is about to deploy: what it does, what it cannot do, where its edge is sharp and where it meets its own limitation.

The hellfire is absolute in the territory it occupies - there is no creature born or made that has stood in the full expression of it and remained standing, no darkness assembled by mortal hands that has not eventually yielded to what he carries in his chest with the settled familiarity of breath. But absolute tools applied without precision are simply destruction without direction, and destruction without direction is the tactical signature of a man who has substituted power for thought and deserves whatever the consequences of that substitution turn out to be.

He will not substitute power for thought.

He thinks about the terrain.

Caverns are their own category of engagement - the commander in him understanding this with the immediate and embodied knowledge of a man who has fought in confined spaces and open ones and every configuration between them, who knows that darkness underground operates differently than darkness above it, that the acoustics of stone amplify and distort in ways that can be exploited or can become liability depending on which party understands them better.

That the relics she described - the accumulated weight of what she carried across centuries, the thread connecting this mortal iteration of her back to everything she is and has been - constitute both objective and vulnerability simultaneously. He cannot simply descend and burn. Cannot deploy the hellfire with the abandon of a man who has no secondary concern beyond the elimination of the target, because the target has positioned itself in proximity to what he is there to protect, and the difference between retrieval and destruction is the precise and exacting difference between succeeding and failing her.

He will not fail her.

The promise lands again in the deepest architecture of him with the same absolute weight it carried when he spoke it against her forehead in the dark of her bedroom - not diminished by daylight, not softened by the distance between declaration and execution that sometimes reveals the structural weakness of promises made in the heat of feeling.

This one holds. This one was not made in heat but in the cold and methodical certainty of a man who had descended into the full accounting of himself before he opened his mouth and confirmed that yes - yes, this is what he is capable of, this is what he will do, this is the promise his body and his bond and the insignia burning above his heart have already been keeping before the words found their way to the surface.

He thinks about the cavern's darkness and what waits in it.

He thinks about walking into it wearing the colors of the Shirai Ryu - those colors that have meant something since the morning he first accepted the weight of the mantle they represented, that have been stained and restored and stained again through every iteration of what he has been required to be, that carry in their fabric the compressed history of men who chose to follow him and the specific gravity of his accountability to them and to the legacy they built together in the spaces between combat and kinship. He thinks about walking into that darkness as himself - not only as Scorpion, not only as the commander whose tactical precision has never once in his adult life been found wanting in the moment it was most required, but as the man who sat across a candlelit table from a woman with citrus-stained fingers and made her a promise that contained his name in it. His actual name. The name that belongs to the layer of him that predates every title and every death and every burning iteration of who grief and vengeance and the long cold education of survival made him into.

Hanzo.

He will walk into that dark as Hanzo.

And he will come back out.

These things are equally true. These things exist in the same category as the sun rising - as the particular and reliable constancy of things that do not negotiate their own continuation, that simply persist through the quality of their own nature, that have never once in the entire recorded history of their existence considered the alternative.

The candlelight does what candlelight has always done to her face across every iteration of this face he has known - catches the angle of her and makes something of the ordinary extraordinary, transmutes the mortal into something that rhymes with divine without quite declaring itself, without quite abandoning the particular beauty of the human beneath the goddess that has always moved him more than the celestial power ever could.

The goddess is vast and ancient and commands the kind of awe that reduces a man to his component elements. But this - this woman with citrus-stained fingers and a stomach that has been announcing its grievances for the better part of an hour and eyes that still carry the evidence of tears she attempted to conceal from him as though he would think less of her for them, as though the sight of her undone by his words had done anything except carve itself into the permanent architecture of him with a precision that no weapon has ever managed -

This is what moves him.

The commander.

The Grandmaster.

The man.

"The stir-fry," he says, reaching for the serving dish with the same economy of motion he brings to everything - unhurried, deliberate, no movement wasted in excess - and delivers a portion to her plate before his own with the instinctive precedence of someone who has spent decades ensuring others were fed before himself, a habit so deeply embedded it no longer registers as choice, "required a higher heat than your stove comfortably provides."

A statement. Not a complaint. The closest thing to culinary vulnerability he will permit himself in this moment, which is to say the admission emerges dry and measured and accompanied by the particular quality of stillness in his expression that she has already learned to read as the space where his humor lives - quiet as embers, offering warmth without performance, without the need to announce itself as humor in order to be received as such by someone who has learned the frequencies on which he operates.

He serves himself. Fills his bowl with the miso he prepared from the specific memory of her preference carried in the marrow of him - richer than most would make it, layered in a way that announces itself without overwhelming, that invites rather than demands. Sets the grilled fish beside it. Takes the onigiri he made and positions one at the edge of her plate without comment, without the ceremony of explanation, because it does not require explanation - it requires only the doing of it, the simple and repeated gesture of a man who expresses what he cannot always organize into language through the more reliable vocabulary of provision. Through the small and faithful architecture of; here. I thought of you. I prepared this. Take it.

His hands wrap around the teacup.

Steam rises.

He is still thinking about the cavern.

Thinks about it the way he thinks about every engagement he has ever prepared for - not with the consuming focus of obsession that crowds out the present and makes a man absent from his own life while it is happening around him, but with the background intelligence of a commander whose mind has long since learned to operate on multiple registers simultaneously, to be here and also to be planning, to be present in the specific and irreplaceable texture of this moment while the deeper architecture processes and assesses and adjusts and readies.

He has sat across tables from men he trusted with his life and made them laugh and meant it, while in the lowest level of his thinking the tactical considerations of the next operation continued their patient and methodical work without pause. Has held his son - the memory arriving unbidden and he does not turn it away, does not have the cruelty for that particular dismissal even now - has held his son in the early morning quiet before the compound woke and been entirely present in that holding while the commander's mind continued its endless and dutiful rotation.

He can be here and also be preparing.

He has always been both.

He watches her reach for the stir-fry with the specific quality of attention he brings to things he will not permit himself to miss - the anticipation in her expression, the way her hunger has softened the careful composure she wears in the hours when she is managing herself, when she is holding the sun goddess and the jazz singer in simultaneous equilibrium with the practiced effort of someone who has spent years ensuring that what she contains does not overflow into spaces that cannot hold it.

She is not managing herself now. She is simply here. Simply hungry. Simply a woman at a table covered in food that they made together at an hour when the rest of the city has long since surrendered to sleep, lit by candlelight, in the particular intimacy of two people who have stopped performing anything for each other and arrived at something considerably more honest.

He finds this - this specific configuration of ordinary and extraordinary, this woman with the sun in her bones reaching for vegetable stir-fry at one in the morning while the world outside her windows carries on in its indifferent rotation - more beautiful than anything that has not earned the word.

He thinks: I will return to this.

Not as comfort. Not as the sentimental anchor of a man who has permitted himself to become so attached to what he is returning to that the attachment becomes liability in the dark, becomes the specific and exploitable weakness of someone whose care for what waits at the surface can be used to compromise the quality of his judgment underground.

He has seen that failure in other men. Has watched it operate - the way love, handled without discipline, becomes the crack in the foundation through which fear enters, and fear in a confined engagement with a creature built from wrong materials by intelligent hands is not an emotion that can be afforded in any quantity.

No.

He thinks: I will return to this, in the same way he thinks: the sun will rise. In the same way he thinks: fire consumes oxygen. In the same way he thinks: the Shirai Ryu holds. These are not comforts. These are the fixed points around which operational reality organizes itself. The constants that do not require the expenditure of belief because they are simply true, have always been true, will continue to be true independent of what any darkness descends to challenge them.

He will return to this table.

To this candlelight.

To her.

The stir-fry is good.

He registers this with the same composed certainty he registers everything - not with surprise, because he has never doubted the capability of her hands, but with the satisfaction of a man whose expectations have been met with the specific precision of things done correctly. The vegetables retain their texture. The seasoning is balanced in a way that suggests instinct rather than formula - the kind of cooking that emerges from someone who has learned the deeper logic of flavor rather than only its rules.

He looks up from his bowl.

Finds her already watching him with that expression she has - the one that lives in the space between curiosity and something warmer, that quality of attention she gives him that feels categorically different from any attention he has received from any person in any lifetime because it does not want anything from him that he is not already offering. Does not require him to be larger or more composed or more invulnerable than he is. Does not assess him for utility or measure him against the specific and exhausting calculus of what Hanzo Hasashi, Grandmaster, Commander, Scorpion, is capable of providing in any tactical or strategic capacity.

It simply sees him.

The man still running operational calculations over his miso soup.

The man who will walk into her sacred dark before this night is finished and emerge from it with what belongs to her, with the evidence of his promise kept written into whatever he finds waiting in those cavern shadows in the patient and constructed malice of a creature that was sent there by hands that understood enough about her to build something specifically calibrated to what she cannot simply overpower.

Those hands concern him.

He files this with the methodical efficiency of a man who has been doing exactly this for the entirety of his adult life - not setting it aside, not permitting the domesticity of this table and this hour to make him soft toward the intelligence that demands his continued attention, but placing it carefully in the operational register where it will remain accessible when he needs to return to it.

After. After the immediate threat has been removed with the direct and permanent efficiency it requires, after he has ascended from her cavern with the relics she left behind and the specific and settled certainty of a promise fulfilled - after all of that, there will be a reckoning with the question of who built what he is about to destroy and why they believed they could direct it toward what is his with impunity.

That reckoning will come.

It will not be pleasant for the one who requires it.

But first: this. First the miso and the fish and the woman across the candle who is watching him with eyes that still carry gold even in their exhaustion, even depleted down to the mortal layer of herself where she is simply hungry and emotional and present in the specific and irreplaceable way of a person who has finally permitted themselves to stop managing the distance between what they are and what they allow themselves to be seen as.

"It is well made," he says.

Three words.

For him - for the man who once went four days without speaking because no words presented themselves as necessary and silence was more efficient than speech deployed without purpose - three words directed at her with the full weight of his attention constitute a declaration. Constitute something that lives in the same territory as everything else he has said to her tonight, everything that required him to descend into the full accounting of himself before he could offer it with the honesty it deserved.

She will know this.

She already knows this.

The bond confirms it - that low and steady pulse between them, the insignia at his chest warm in the way it has been warm since the moment it declared itself, carrying the specific temperature of something that has found its correct configuration and settled into it with the finality of a key finding the lock it was shaped for.

He feels her through it. Feels the hunger abating at the edges as the food does its necessary work, feels the specific relief of a body being returned to itself after deprivation, feels beneath both of those things the quieter presence of what she will not say and does not need to say - the awareness she carries, same as his, of what the hours after this meal will require. The dark she cannot enter. The promise he will go to fulfill.

She feels it in him too.

He knows she does.

He reaches for the orange she left half-peeled at the edge of the table - the one she set down when the timers began demanding their attention, abandoned mid-task with the evidence of her citrus-stained fingers still present on its skin - and finishes what she started. Splits it with the quiet efficiency of hands that have always found it easier to complete things than to leave them unfinished. Sets half before her plate with the same wordless precedence as the onigiri, as everything he has done tonight that does not require announcement to constitute care.

He will descend into her sacred dark.

He will find what was placed there by hands that understood enough to be dangerous.

He will remove it with the hellfire that has followed him across death and rebirth and every iteration of his existence, the fire that has never once failed to burn what required burning, that has survived every darkness it has been asked to illuminate and emerged from each one still burning.

He will come back.

He lifts his teacup.

Meets her eyes across the candle's small and faithful fire.

It does not feel like a last meal.

That final meal, meant to symbolize the death that comes after, is not what Olivia feels while Hanzo joins her at the large dinner table.

It's hope that the woman feels.

Hope that this is a dinner, a large variety of different cuisines, of small and grand pleasures of who they are both, that is meant to fuel a battle that will end in victory. The optimism that the sun goddess has always carried, now carries on onto the jazz singer. It is why Olivia does not look at the commander right away, grabbing her plate, then a bowl, to serve herself the earthy stew. There is that excitement, that enthusiastic devotion the singer carries when it comes to food, and sharing it, creating it with, the one she holds dear.

Abruptly, because the bond between them is powerful and tight knit, does her sapphire eyes glance up to Hanzo. At the way he holds his cup of tea. Catching how the candles that she has set, lit with matches as any ordinary person would, flicker and illuminate against the features of the man. Cheekbones and jaw caressed by the light of the heat. Those small strands of silver that have grown against his midnight colored hair showing visible in the candlelight.

He is thinking. Looming silently on what is to come after this meal. Hanzo's mind still focused on what is in that cavern, that monster of rube scales and a slithering body, lurking in the back of her thoughts the way a nightmare is after awakening and forgetting about it when sunlight hits her thoughts.

Olivia serves herself, carefully now, slowly, as she allows these thoughts and emotions to dance with her delight and hunger. It does not make her uncomfortable, not truly, because she does not feel worry or anxiety from the commander. A scoop of the stir-fry. A ladle full of lamb stew. A hefty serving of the creamy pasta. They all are portioned and set in front of her, the jazz singer still allowing herself to read and feel Hanzo.

She does not mean to. As a sun goddess, Olivia would be able to push away these thoughts and the emotions but as a mortal woman, who is incapable of mastering what she is at her core, is not as majestic and trained. All Olivia can do is take what Hanzo is feeling in stride. Inhaling slowly, half smiling at the aromas of the meal they've created, and sentience of patience collides with her because of Hanzo.

Guarding. Waiting. Protecting a location that was not it's place to protect to begin with. The birth, of being created by someone who aims to corrupt the sanctuary that the sun goddess once resided in, reaches her. The creature, that beast that Olivia had seen in the darkness of her cavern, created for the sole reason to be a trap for others or her. Someone who knew her. Someone who held a knowledge, a map, of who she was a as sun goddess. Someone who did their homework and became elite in it. That fact alone is enough to make her already trouble stomach churn and Olivia stops where she holds the spoon to her mouth, ready to taste the stew, and closes her eyes as she inhales sharply.

It is an unfamiliar experience. To be one with someone like this. To feel what Hanzo feels, beyond the facial expressions, different than the actions that have been conducted when words are not enough, and certainty in the history they share as goddess and grandmaster.

This is vastly different. Heavy and light at the same time. Bright and yet carrying a darkness that Olivia cannot describe in the english language.

It distracts her but there is no annoyance in this. There were only a few times, in this life and the last, where Hanzo Hasashi has spurred frustration within her person and this is not one of them. This is Hanzo solidifying his promise to her. How in these thoughts, as he holds his tea cup, the green tea and jasmine prepared perfectly within it, carries hellfire.

The sun goddess has always felt the grandmaster's hellfire. That flame the Shirai Ryu leader carried with him for as long as she can remember. Without the insignia, it has always remained, and her divinity could only sit next to it with a loving smile to give.

Now… now Olivia feels it. It does not hum the way her light does. It burns, sears, and thrives the way it's hellish home does. It does not whisper, the way her fire does, but groans, growls, and exists in a sphere of constant determination and discord. This is what Hanzo carries and will remain so until who knows how long. The spoonful of stew goes into her mouth, tasting, chewing, swallowing, as this truth sits with her. An epiphany hits the woman at this knowledge of the commander. The control, the exhaustion, it must take to keep this hellfire settled without combusting. Even as they share this meal, this peace of domesticity the way couples would do, the hellfire does not cease it's existence.

Sapphire eyes gaze at Hanzo, softening, without saying a word to him as her spoon settles back into the bowl of stew. There is worry. Concern for what he feels. There is not an ounce of feeling of failure from the man but Olivia can sense something off regardless of that drive to go into that dark place underneath the earth's crust.

"Heh." Olivia chuckles, hearing what he says finally, speaking of the stir-fry, of how her stove does not reach the required heat to properly cook the vegetables the way he is used to.

Olivia hears, feels, the humor from Hanzo and appreciates it. That quiet and somehow humble sense of humor that always gets a grin and giggle from her. A grin that curls up on her lips now, as Hanzo serves her the onigiri, a faint blush blossoming on her cheeks. Could Hanzo feel this? The softness that she feels when he gives her such a loving gesture? It blooms within her, defenseless and open, no longer hidden, not anymore, ever since they have created this bond together through the mark on his chest. He must know. He has to know. Words could not describe it anyway. A bond, this tattoo created from her divinity, meant to remain with the commander even when his body has become ash.

Olivia takes the onigiri, careful than she was before, and brings it up for a bite. The chewy texture, the sticky grain of rice that's molded by the calloused hands of the commander, and the faint taste of salt with it. This instance is what provides the singer a chance to induldge in their dinner. Reaching for the plate of stir-fry she served for herself, grabbing chopsticks, picking up a hefty amount between the utensil and eats. Her stomach is in control now. The exhaustion from the last twenty-fours must be sated, regardless of what Hanzo is thinking, of what she might be feeling about him, and what will come after the meal.

The stew is perfect. The grilled fish, the way Olivia had not told Hanzo how to prepare, is cooked the way she likes it. She turns to the stir-fry again, then the pasta, and feels no shame in this gluttony. The fuel needed for her body to recover, after sleep can do nothing for her now, is one Olivia cannot afford to feel embarrassed about. Soon two of her plates are clean, the onigiri but a few specks of rice against the edge of her plate, and Olivia reaches for the iced water, gulping and exhaling loudly afterwards, but her appetite is still not filled. The sun goddess, daughter of a the star that brings life, carries a molten energy within her that cannot be filled after two plates.

Hanzo can feel this. The hunger that is compelling and ruling over the sun goddess who has never needed nutrition such as this. Olivia's own memories come to her, not of the long lost past, but of recent memories. Of their meeting in the commander's work cafeteria, where she had lost her temper, where Hanzo had spoke to her of proper consumption and carbohydrates. Of orange slices and roasted chicken. She had not forgotten these words, these tidbits of knowledge, knowing the commander must of spoken of them for her own regard, the two sharing that voracious appetite to keep their bodies from crumbling by the weight of hellfire and sun.

Olivia's gaze goes to Hanzo, who holds his tea, who merely is gazing at her as she yields to this sin, curious to what he is thinking of her right now. That loving gaze, tenderhearted and sweet, as she sets down her glass of water and leans forward to lean against her hands, resting her chin there.

She allows her hunger to linger, to allow Hanzo to feel the gentleness she feels for him, not just the commander, not just Scorpion or grandmaster Hasashi, but for him. Just Hanzo. The man who continues to amaze her with each encounter they share, the good and the bad. Hears those three words, the careful compliment that speaks truth in it, and the bond between them glows.

The insignia glows. Olivia can see it underneath his shirt. How it warms and heals and thrives.

Then the orange slice is given. The sun goddess who guides the sun, the woman who sings the the blues at night, can feel a titter of enjoyment escape her, almost silent in how it comes. Shoulders shaking, nose wrinkling, and her hand that was underneath her chin goes for the orange slice that was placed on her plate for her.

Olivia takes it, brings it to her lips, and bites down on the fleshy fruit. Tangy and sweet. The citrus a kind taste compared to the savory meal they are having. Hanzo drinks his tea and with it, she can feel his thoughts, of how he promises himself that he will return to this, to her, and the concern the woman felt for her beloved subsides.

The hellfire burns between them now and the Olivia serves herself another plate, knowing Hanzo will join her in this feast just as soon, and after it he will triumph in conquering the evil that is within her cavern.

The meal is finished. Empty platters, stained with pasta sauce, tea cups that carry that darken circle within it's porcelain, and chopsticks and settled down properly against their holders. The candles sticks melted, barely half of what they were when Olivia had lit them, and they still remain vibrant with what life they still hold.

The jazz singer gives one last bite to her dessert. A warm, mess of sweet potatoes, smothered in butter and cinnamon, and allowing the taste to rest with her before swallowing. It is a dish Hanzo prepared and one that she knows settles with him due to his discomfort with sweets. A treat, one last savory dish, before they two stand up from the dining table and begin to clean the mess of their meal.

Olivia was stern about not worrying about dishes, reminding Hanzo not out of thinking he would forget but because it was something she needed to push. Opting to place most of their plates, platters, and glasses into a dishwasher. It would provide her a small comfort in what is about to be done after this. Hanzo doesn't argue, because he knows better than to do so, and she can feel the prevision that begins to grow from him. Already the commander is thinking about his uniform. The armor. The colors of the Shirai Ryu. What weapons to take, what artillery could be useful within the caverns if it was possible, and Olivia already has an answer for those thoughts.

"Don't take a gun, darlin'. Those caverns… you could cause an accident to happen with the force. They are pure rock, sturdy, but the power of a bullet is not one I have ever tested down there." How could she? A sun goddess had no use for guns or bombs or machines all those eons ago. "I would not want you crushed because of something mankind has created to kill."

The sun goddess slips out of her in those words, icy and annoyed and the insignia against Hanzo's chest burns from what she feels.

"Come. I have to make you a map. I have to remember how to make a portal for you." To remember how she felt the day she went in that cavern alone, where she found the once chipped kunai, and the room to which Hanzo would need to venture into. The commander gives Olivia a look, almost inquisitive and jaw tense, and she pouts at him.

"Yer portals won't get ya there, Hanzo. Not without me. Yer resilient but a portal to my cavern is… not an easy technique to do. I'm not doubtin' yer hellfire. I feel it better than I ever have in knowin' you but even the strongest of sorcerer's could never get in there without my permission or magic."

Unless that sorcerer was half god.

The kitchen is cleared. Pots and pans temporarily discarded to the sink to soak and the two returning to the jazz singer's bedroom.

Map, a map… Olivia wonders to herself, trying to think of how she can write this out, and what paper was long enough. Rummaging through her collection of notebooks and lyrical notes, of those lines filled with songs that have not been written, until she finally settles upon a long box, opening it, the scent of something familiar hitting her and she smiles as she pulls the box out from her drawer.

"My father gave these to me when I got my first shot at writin' a single to release. I never used 'em because they were made for orchestras. I thought maybe one day I would but… my band is too small to ever perform with such a range." She opens the box, the fresh clean sheet music coming out the way paper does when moved, a soft rustling as Olivia holds the paper. "It's fragile but big enough for you to use. Luckily the path within the cavern isn't to complex for me to draw out."

A blue pen is taken and Olivia settles on her bed, the one they had shared hours before, before patting down next to her to Hanzo to join. The commander joins her, this tenderness radiating with him, and the jazz singer can't help but feel bashful at it when they sit side by side. She clears her throat, pen in hand, before she begins to give an outline to the best of her abilities.

"When you arrive you will be greeted with darkness. There is no light within the cavern in most areas, as I held no need for it given my ability to glow. Be careful, darlin'. There are slopes, uneven surfaces an' debris. I did not make the cavern for anyone to venture easily an' I… made sure there was no handrails or concrete pathways. It is pure rock an' sand."

"But-" Olivia draws out the trail on paper, knowing it by heart, to the direction of where left and right that Hanzo must take in the darkness. "-the closer you get to the door I need you to find, you will be greeted by light. Candles. Maybe incense. It will sense my magic on you an' activate. There will be wooden structures an' timber supports. Sand paintings. Created by myself. Depicting the sun, my sun, our sun. Follow my art, darlin'. Follow it until you find that door made of pine an' my symbol on it." The same symbol on Hanzo's chest. "It is the only door within my cavern. Any other door… is not mine. There should be no other doors."

Her voice murmurs now, sounding unsure, frightened that whoever who has tampered with her sanctuary, might have created traps or distractions away from the center of her home. Olivia's fingers tremble, shaking against the sheet music, and it stops when Hanzo takes her wrist, grounding her, his thumb pressing against the pulse that has quickened at the anxiety that spikes.

The fear, one rare within a sun goddess, trickles out of her. Her breathing quickens slightly and Olivia can't help but lean against Hanzo now, trying to keep herself from overthinking, from not worrying about what could have tainted her home and touched her refuge when her days as an immortal felt too much. The sheet music in her paper, along with the pen, loosen in her grip and she allows it to rest against her lap, as Olivia can feel Hanzo pull her against him.

"I'm okay, I promise, I'm…" sorry. Sapphire eyes glance into Hanzo's amber ones, sighing, relaxing as he holds her face, thumbs brushing against her cheeks, and their foreheads touch. It's a moment of weakness, overanalyzing what has happened to her almost-home while she was shattered, trying to remember how it happened to begin with.

Yet those thoughts dwindle, Hanzo sustaining Olivia with his touch, his gaze, his voice, of directing her how to breath and how to remain calm. That yes, someone has tampered with her sanctuary, but she is safe because he is here and nothing will touch her while he is.

Hanzo already knowing she is going to apologize. The how her voice cracks against his as he holds her and Olivia can't help but give him that small defeated smile knowing he's succeeding in calming her down.

"Give me a second. I can do this, we can do this, I know we can." The commander nods against her and she leans back, parting from him, her slender fingers returning to grab the pen and paper, spreading it out on her lap evenly, and gives another sigh to calm the tension in her shoulders.

"Inside my room, you'll see a bed, an' a couple dressers." Armoires. Tall and wide, inside them holding dresses and shoes and possibly weapons. Yet these trinkets are not what she wants the grandmaster to bring. "What I want you to find is a large strongbox. A chest. Whatever you wanna call it. Wooden an' heavy with a coat of emerald paint an' lined with gold. You can't truly miss the thing once you see it." And this is the demand Olivia is not sure Hanzo can do but must ask of him. "I need the entire box. Everythin' inside of it? Is precious to me. My.. memories. Some of my weapons. Documents an' jewelry an' gifts. Tokens of love an' friendship. These items can help me, darlin'. They can help me remember what I was. What I cannot figure out on my own."

The pen gives it's last line of directions, an awful doodle of the strongbox that Olivia describes, before drawing a blue circle around it.

"I don't know if you can lift it but when you do, when you find it, summon me. Call for me an' I will open my portal. You will return here an' you will be safe too."

As for the creature with the ruby scales…

The insignia burns between them again. Vibrant and golden. The worry Olivia holds for Hanzo growing as she thinks about the reptile that might be hiding within her cavern, ready to strike, ready to kill, at anyone who might venture down there.

"As a goddess, I meant what I said when I asked you to kill that thing in my home, but as a woman, as a mortal, I am… scared, Hanzo. I know you will return, I know you will kill an' return to me as you always do, my hope has not dwindled about this, but I am scared."

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| He does not flinch. This is the first thing to understand about him - that the news of what awaits in the dark beneath the earth arrives not as catastrophe but as information, and he receives information the way stone receives weather: without resistance, without reorganization of his fundamental self, allowing it simply to happen across the surface of him and pass.

He has stood in worse rooms than this. He has been handed worse truths. The whole architecture of who Hanzo Hasashi became was built on the rubble of losses that would have ended a man of lesser construction, and he did not end. He calcified. He endured. He persists in the way that mountains persist - not because mountains are invincible but because they are patient beyond the measure of anything that has ever tried to bring them low.

So he hears her warning about the gun, and he accepts it.

Not because he requires the instruction - the tactical mind already understood the acoustics of confined stone, had already dismissed projectile ordnance three thoughts prior in the private geometry of his operational preparation - but because it comes from her, and what comes from her is received with the full and unhurried attention he gives to everything that matters.

He lets her feel this through the bond. Lets the warmth of it confirm what his face, composed as ever in its economy of visible emotion, may not announce with sufficient clarity: I hear you. I will not take the gun. You have been listened to completely.

The pout pulls at something in the low country of him where the commander does not reach.

He does not smile. But the lines around his eyes shift a degree - a measurement so slight that only someone who has learned to read the frequencies of him would register it as the humor it is, as the warmth, as the thing he cannot always organize into language finding its way through the only aperture currently available to it.

The kitchen is cleared. He follows her to the bedroom with the same economy of movement he carries everywhere - no wasted gesture, no shuffling indirection, the body of a man who has always known exactly where he is going and moved toward it with the directness of someone for whom purpose and motion have been a single continuous thing since the first morning he laced on his armor. He observes her rummaging.

He observes the quality of her searching - the specific half-absent focus of a woman turning an internal problem over simultaneously with an external one, trying to find the right container for something that does not fit in ordinary containers.

The sheet music emerges.

He looks at it. Looks at her. Holds in the low register of his thinking the particular grace of the man who gave these to his daughter at her first professional triumph, imagining that day - her face, the gift, the meaning carried in the gesture of a father who recognized in his child something worth celebrating with the good paper. He does not say this. It does not require saying. He simply accepts the weight of it with the same seriousness he brings to the weight of everything she offers him.

He sits beside her when she pats the space.

The bashfulness she feels - he catches it through the bond like catching a coal, warm and precise, and something in him recognizes it with a care so deep it does not know what to do with itself except remain very still, the way one remains still near something rare that does not yet know whether it is safe.

They have slept beside each other. He has held her in the specific dark of her deepest grief and she has held his name against his chest with her forehead. And still - still this, the warmth she cannot suppress at the simple fact of him near her. He finds this beautiful in a way for which he has no language that he would not embarrass himself trying to deploy.

She draws the map.

He watches her hands move across the sheet music - the slender fingers, the pen making its careful lines, and he memorizes it the way he memorizes everything tactically necessary: completely, permanently, without effort. The map enters him and does not leave. Left and right. Uneven terrain. No handrails, no concrete paths - only the accumulated geography of a goddess who made her sanctuary for herself and not for navigation, who never intended it for guests, who could not have imagined that one day she would be sitting on a mortal bed drawing directions for a man who would carry hellfire through it in her name.

He watches her hands begin to tremble.

He moves without deliberation. The wrist, first - his thumb finding the pulse point with the quiet instinct of a man who has learned that some forms of stabilization require physical ground before they can become anything else.

He does not speak yet. He lets the pressure of his thumb against the quickened pulse say what he intends to convey first: here. This. The ground does not move. I am here and the ground does not move. Then he draws her against him, because she is leaning, because her body has made the decision already and his only task is to not fail the thing she is reaching toward.

She says I'm okay. Her voice cracks on the word with the honesty of a woman who cannot quite sustain the claim but is determined to make it anyway.

He holds her face.

His thumbs trace her cheeks with the unhurried precision of a man who is in no danger of being anywhere other than exactly here, and their foreheads touch, and he speaks to her in that low register that has only ever been used for things that require absolute truth, that strips away the commander and the grandmaster and leaves only the man who knows what it is to be afraid of what has been taken from him -

- not the fear of dying. Never that. Death is an old country, one he has visited twice and returned from wearing its passport, and it holds no particular terror for a man who has already made peace with its geography.

No. The fear he understands, the fear he recognizes now in the trembling of her hands and the crack in her voice, is the fear of loss. Of violation. Of the sanctuary being wrong when you return to it. Of the thing that was supposed to be yours, safe, unreachable by whatever hunts you in the waking world - of finding it no longer intact. He was not a goddess but he was a grandmaster and he had once returned to a home that should have been safe and found it not intact, and he knows in the marrow of him what it costs to hold that knowledge and continue to stand.

She collects herself.

He waits.

Not with the particular patience of a man withholding judgment, not with the strained quiet of someone resisting the urge to offer comfort that would not serve her - but with the patience of the mountain, which has no agenda about when the weather clears, which simply remains in its own nature while the storm passes and does not consider the storm an imposition. He has time. He has more time than most creatures living have any right to claim. He will not spend any of it making her feel insufficient for the seconds it takes her to retrieve herself.

She gives him the rest. The candles. The incense. Follow my art. The door of pine and the symbol - his symbol now, her sun inscribed in him and pulsing with a warmth that does not diminish and has not diminished since the moment it declared itself above his heart with the settled certainty of a thing that had always been there and only required the right threshold to become visible.

The strongbox. Emerald-painted. Heavy. Filled with the accumulated weight of centuries - the weapons and documents and jewelry and gifts, the tokens of love and friendship, the memories, the material record of every iteration of who she has been across the long and ancient arc of her existence.

He understands what this is. Understands it with a precision that requires no explanation from her because he has carried his own version of this - the compressed history of a man who survived by making himself into something harder than what tried to destroy him, and who sometimes, in the deep night, needed to hold the physical evidence that there had been something before the hardness, that the man who existed prior to everything was real and had been loved and had loved and was not simply a story he told himself to justify continuing. He will carry it out. He does not say: I will try.  He does not say: If it is possible.  He does not qualify. The strongbox will be carried out. It will be whole. What she left behind will be returned to her with the same integrity it possessed when she sealed the door of pine and began her long and devastating mortal interruption, and the creature waiting in the ruby scales in the accumulated wrong of its constructed presence will not be a complication he cannot manage - it will be the thing he removes on his way through.

When she says she is scared -

He looks at her.

Looks at her for a long moment with the full and undeflected quality of attention that he gives to things he needs to understand completely before he responds to them, and what he sees is this: a woman who has already given him everything tonight that it is possible to give another person, who has let him hold her tears and her history and the private map of her sacred dark, and who is now offering him the last honest thing - not the sun goddess saying I have faith in your power, not the professional composure that she wears in the hours when she is managing herself - but the mortal woman with the citrus-stained fingers saying I am scared, which is not a weakness and is not a failing and is in fact the most correct response to the situation that honesty allows for.

He reaches for her hand.

Turns it palm-up. Holds it with both of his - the calloused hands that have made onigiri and gripped weapons and held his son in the early morning and carried the dead weight of everyone he has ever failed to save and emerged from every fire still intact, still capable of this, of the specific and unhurried gentleness of a man who has nothing left to prove about what he can endure and therefore no longer needs to perform invulnerability for anyone.

"I know," he says.

Two words. Full weight. Not a dismissal of her fear. Not an instruction to release it. Not the particular condescension of comfort offered by someone who has not earned the right to offer it - he does not tell her the fear is wrong.

The fear is correct. Something was sent into her home by someone with sufficient knowledge of her to build a trap calibrated to her specific vulnerability, and she cannot go down there herself, and she must send the man who carries her insignia into a dark she cannot follow him into. The fear is the appropriate response of a woman who loves something she cannot fully protect.

He knows.

He has been that woman. He has stood exactly there - in the specific and terrible position of watching someone walk toward something that could unmake them and being unable to follow, being unable to interpose himself between the danger and the thing he could not afford to lose - and he did not survive that particular lesson by pretending the fear was unreasonable.

But.

His thumb moves against the back of her hand with the same slow and patient economy he brings to everything. Pressing. Grounding. Saying what his mouth will now also say, because she has given him tonight her complete honesty and the only acceptable response to complete honesty is its equal in return.

"I have died," he says, quiet as stone under its weight of snow, quiet as the deepest chamber of a mountain that has not shifted in ten thousand years, "and returned. I have stood in the dark that wanted to keep me, and I walked out of it. I have buried everything." A beat. The insignia warm between them, gold against his chest, her sun in his skin. "I have buried everything, and I am still here."

He does not say: I am not afraid.  That would be false, and he does not offer her false things. He is afraid in the way that all careful men are afraid - not of dying, not of the dark, not of the creature with ruby scales and the constructed malice of something built by informed hands - but of failing her. Of returning empty-handed. Of the strongbox left behind. These are the fears of a man who has promised something and is constitutionally incapable of the alternative to keeping it.

He can live with those fears. Has lived with harder ones. Has carried heavier things across longer distances through worse weather.

"The cavern will not keep me," he says, and it is not bravado. It is the flat declarative of a man reporting a fact about the fixed points of reality - the sun rises, fire burns, the Shirai Ryu holds, Hanzo Hasashi does not leave the things he has promised undone.

He will descend.

He will find what waits in the constructed dark of her sanctuary.

He will bring her back what is hers.

And he will return to this - to her face in candlelight, to the insignia warm above his heart, to the specific and ordinary miracle of a woman who waited with citrus on her hands and hope that did not dwindle - with the whole of himself intact.

This, too, is a fixed point.

He holds her hand in both of his and waits for her to feel it settle - not comfort, not reassurance, but the particular quality of a man who has already survived the worst thing he could imagine losing and still found his way back to the capacity for this, for the warmth of a shared table and the willingness to promise, for the absolute and unhurried certainty of someone who has simply run out of things left to be afraid of.

The mountain.

In every season.

Still standing. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

"I know."

These words alone speak to Olivia in a way she cannot describe.

Her entire life, in this mortal life that was given to her as a curse, not a blessing, the woman has always felt out of place with the era. These last thirty three years of existing as a woman, not the proper goddess she should be, left a feeling of being unseen by others.

To run away as a child when campfires would burst in a fury that would frighten her and into her mother's arms. Her grandmother needing to keep oil lamps away from her adolescent granddaughter because it seems the oil burn quicker whenever she came to visit. Those nights where her father worried why his only daughter didn't need a heated blanket during the blizzards of the winter season.

The list goes on. Some that do not need to be said, not to the warrior sitting next to her, because Hanzo knows what response the element of fire does when a sun goddess enters a room. This identity Olivia has kept hidden, secret from all that she loves and trusts, because she knows they would not truly understand that myth has always been connected to the reality of the world.

Earthrealm. The words sits with her. That is the name of the realm they were re-born in. Earthrealm. The home of not just the sun goddess's mother sun, but the home of the commander and jazz singer. Another scripture of this world that many do not know of. Not to mankind of this era.

This is why Hanzo's words resonate with her. He sees her. Shares the same curse, the same burning, and the same burden they must carry in this new life. Some days, although she might not say it out loud, Olivia does not always see it as a burden. Merely something she must endure because it is what fate has bestowed upon her. She knows deep down it is something she tells herself to lesson the aching of feeling incomplete.

That fate, those Titans that control the destiny of all, do this for a reason.

Hanzo takes her hand, looks at her, sees her for what she feels, and her bright sapphire eyes gaze up to meet his darker amber ones. He holds her with bold of his hands, being reminded the skillful touch of them, not as a warrior, but as a man. Who knows how to mold onigiri. Who cups her cheek and caresses her sun-kissed skin as if she is made of something beautiful and delicate, although Hanzo has never thought she fragile when he does, and that alone brightens her core of such truths.

He speaks of his own death. Of the times he has died, returns, and dies again. How Hanzo has buried everything and still remains here. Has lost Harumi, in different realms, in different timelines, along with his son, and has buried them over and over again. Remaining without them, without the Shirai Ryu, and continues on the way she has. Olivia can sense Hanzo's fear. It is not a fear of death, a fear of losing himself to the darkness of her caverns or becoming injured from the beast that resides in a place she once called a sanctuary.

It is another fear all together. She sees it in his gaze. A fear she's held before, human and humble, of failing another. It is an emotion that Olivia struggles to live with, as both goddess and singer, yet within Hanzo's eyes, those eyes that reminds her of sunsets, carries the fear differently.

He holds it. Carries it the way one holds a weapon or a relic passed down through generations. Neither trembling or uncertain. It is in this that Olivia feels herself soften, understanding what this means for them and her body relaxes next to Hanzo's.

Through their bond now, words do not secure the commander's promise, as everything he feels, everything that Hanzo does not say, can be felt in Olivia.

"I believe you." She whispers, smiling slightly, comforted by what he says, no matter if he thinks she is not. "I believe you, with all that I am, my love."

They share this moment together, the map in her other hand almost forgotten, as the grandmaster holds her hand with his. Olivia knows Hanzo will keep his word. His vow and promise. That determined unstoppable person that he is, who holds honor and respect above all there is in life, including with his own person and those he decides to keep in it.

He, she thinks to herself, as she leans forward slightly, pressing her forehead against Hanzo's shoulder, settling there, allowing herself to relax further in this tender instance they share, has not changed at all. Every promise, every occurrence, in the past we shared together, he has never broken his word. Olivia inhales and exhales against Hanzo, nodding, before placing her drawn out map forward for him to take it. To release her hand and to read over the instructions, those heavy lines of blue ink, and into the cavern of her past.

Next, her sapphire eyes almost say to him, is the portal.

The jazz singer meditates as the commander gets ready for the journey through the portal. It is not the same as his hellfire teleporting, far more ancient and lasting, but the woman who holds the divinity must carefully recall how to perform it without losing control.

For if she fails, a vortex will be created instead, and all around could be pulled into it by chance. A mishap that Olivia did not want to happen.

Hanzo leaves, if only for the hour she meditates, and she has no clue where he actually goes to prepare himself. He had promised her he would not bring artillery into her cavern, as it was too risky to take, but it did not mean the commander would not bring other weapons. Olivia wonders about it, in her meditation, if only for a few seconds before she returns back to her teachings as a sun-child.

Legs crossed, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, fingers linked together, the sun goddess within her journeys into a mental state of mind that emits a glow around her person. Luminous and golden. After the sleep, the shared meal, and the courage to trust in the grandmaster, it is enough for Olivia to venture into this part of herself.

The memories come to her slowly. Somewhat painfully, a headache rising to her temple, one that throbs silently within her. Remembering the first day her mother, the sun itself, spoke to her teachings of creating portals to travel from place to place. That cosmic sublime skill that only deities can summon without fail. Her mother, who is only but a voice and aura, beckons her to try. That she should not be afraid of what lies within her as a young goddess. That fear, the anxiety of being uncertain, would only create a portal that might swallow others into a black void, than to guide them towards home. That her power is not something to be fearful of but to embrace, for the power to summon a portal, to travel from planet to planet, realm to realm, is not only for her own benefit but for others.

At the time Olivia had not known what that meant. The youth, describe as possibly adolescent by human standards, did not understand that her portals could be used to assist mankind. To save others. To lead others into safe havens. That her light was meant to be shared, not hoarded, and that included her ability to travel in ways mortals could not. For the goddess at the time she had only thought of herself, to travel and to discover, than to help others. It for be years before the the youth ever considered to use her portal for others, only wanting to indulge in her own selfish curiosities.

The first portal the young goddess summons is imperfect but serviceable. Small and spinning, whistling almost when it is summoned, resembling that of a firework that spins once it's lit. A quick step towards Cronus, the ringed planet of the solar system, and it is in that memory she recalls observing the beauty of that place with awe. Every portal after, directed Olivia to a new planet, a new moon, and a new star.

It's in this memory the jazz singer understands what her portal is meant to look like after she masters it. Nothing like her first few times, bright and orange, spiraling and vibrant. Instead it becomes a blackened spiral with a rim of orange around it. To resemble the eclipse of the sun itself. Glowing around circle of it and almost ominous in appearance. Olivia remembers a time she used it, with mankind, and how it brought dread to others as a result.

It is one of the first memories, she recalls, where the sun goddess had felt sadden by the rejection of mankind. They revered her assistance because of how foreboding her portal appears. It is not as raident as Lord Raiden's, with it's electricity and bright blue light. Nor it is as sinister and beautiful as Shang Tsung's. Her portal resembles that of a bad omen and although her mother sun thought it natural for her daughter's transportation technique, thinking it lovely in it's own way, Olivia at the time did not think that.

It had only made her limit who she uses her portals for after that.

Maybe, the jazz singer muses to herself, her meditation almost coming to an end, I can change this now. Maybe I can make it more… mine in this new life.

It wouldn't be impossible but tricky. Olivia already wondering how she can do this. To focus hard enough to shift the appearance, to make it something to match her as she is now, for she is not just a sun goddess anymore. She is a mortal woman. The jewel of the Blue Sax. The daughter of Molly and Eli Winter. Her new portal should speak of these parts of her.

I will summon the portal once Hanzo returns, her thoughts continue, as she stumbles to stand up, legs slightly numb from sitting for almost an hour in the same spot in her meditation, I think I know how I wish it to be. Golden. Golden and bright. The way my stage lights up. The way my dresses are when I get ready for my performances. Golden in the way that his-

She stops in her tracks. Thoughts becoming silent as she senses the commander before he even comes to her apartment. The insignia, burning and gilded, continues to show the connection they share. Olivia shifts slightly when she hears Hanzo return, arriving at her front door of her apartment, and she can hear the loud thump of his shoes against her wooden floors. The heaviness isn't from his boots alone but what he might be carrying. Ready for what it so to come next.

"Hanzo."

She greets him from within her bedroom, wondering just what he is wearing, wanting to see if he still carries the symbol of the Shirai Ryu as she requested of him and if the colors have returned to his person in this mission. Her smiles appears before he enters, far too pleased to know he's arrived, and it is felt without words, without saying, because the warrior within the commander can feel it pressed against his chest by the insignia.

"You're back."

Her hand rests over his gauntlet - that small, luminous weight of her - and Scorpion does not move. Does not pull away. Does not close the distance. He simply endures the contact the way ancient stone endures the tide, feeling every increment of it, cataloguing it in the hollow architecture of a chest that has forgotten warmth but never forgotten its absence.

He lets her speak. Lets the words of her conviction fill the air between them like incense, like prayer, like every beautiful and ruinous thing that has ever believed itself indestructible.

My light is the light.

I cannot die.

When he finally speaks, it is not with the rawness of moments ago. What surfaces now is quieter. More terrible for its quietude.

"I have stood in the ruins of temples," Scorpion begins, his voice low and unhurried, each word deliberate as the fall of ash, "whose gods could not be named because those gods no longer exist to answer to their names."

His iridescent white eyes do not leave hers. That burning, unblinking gaze that has witnessed the architecture of centuries collapse into dust and silence.

"They were certain, as you are certain. They spoke of their light, their dominion, their inevitability." The hellfire at the edges of his form dims, barely perceptible, as though even the flame understands this is not a moment for spectacle. "The Netherrealm consumed them regardless. Not because it was stronger. Because it was indifferent."

He tilts his masked face toward the Sea of Blood, toward those whispering mouths beneath the surface that still shape her name in tongues she has not told him she recognizes - and he has noticed, he has always noticed - before returning his gaze to her.

"Divinity is a crown, Olivia." The name leaves him rarely, a rare deliberate thing, weighted with everything the title of woman is not. "The Netherrealm does not bow to crowns. It does not negotiate with radiance. It does not pause to consider what you are before it unmakes you." A beat. "It will not care. That is the nature of an abyss. It has no capacity for care. It simply and endlessly takes."

He does not withdraw his hand from beneath hers. Neither does he turn it over, does not close his fingers around her smaller ones in the gesture that lives permanently at the edge of his restraint. The boundary holds. It always holds. Though the cost of it is written in the tension running through every line of him.

"Those voices that call to you," he says, and watches something flicker across her face, confirmation enough, "they called to others before you who also believed they could offer salvation. Who also believed themselves unconquerable." His gaze is merciless in its honesty, though there is no cruelty in it. Only the unbearable weight of someone who has learned every lesson the hard way, through loss and fire and the specific silence of those who do not return. "They are in the sea now. Their light indistinguishable from the dark."

The hand she does not touch - the one that trembled near her cheek and retreated - rises again, and this time gestures toward the expanse of crimson behind him. The vastness of it. The endlessness.

"I do not doubt your light, desert flower." The epithet is his concession. His softening. The single admission that beauty and power both live in the same breath when it comes to her. "I doubt the sea. I doubt what waits beneath it with sempiternal patience and ancient hunger. I doubt the assumption that what has killed gods before has grown suddenly merciful in the centuries since."

He turns back to her fully.

"It is, as you say, none of my concern what befalls a goddess." The words are said without distance, without dismissal. They are said the way a man states a fact he despises. "You are not mine to protect. You have made certain I understand this. The boundaries between us are drawn with careful hands and I have respected every line."

The hellfire flickers back, framing him in orange and gold, and for a moment he and she are painted in the same light - sun and hellfire, indistinguishable at the edges.

"But I have buried gods," Scorpion says finally, the words arriving from somewhere beneath grief, beneath fury, beneath the long complicated silence of a man who has lost everything he ever loved to the certainty that it could not be lost. "I have watched the divine descend. I have seen immortality proven mortal by a world that does not recognize the difference."

His grip on her elbow does not loosen.

Olivia's temper rises the way tinder is tossed into a bonfire.

The way Scorpion speaks to her. The stillness of his voice. The way he speaks, never condescending, as the warrior is never one who does that with her, but the merciless dark voice he gives when he's trying to prove a point between immortality and the arrogance that co-exist with each other.

The specter speaks of the sea. Lights that are impossible to tell apart because those with her own divinity have sank to the bottom, never to return, to remain in an endless drowning.

He calls it a crown, Olivia thinks to herself, glaring at Scorpion now before glancing down at the armor of the warrior, and this place does not bow to those with crowns.

The truth hurt sometimes. The sun goddess knows this in the eons she has thrived and lived in Earthrealm. Now within the NetherRealm, a place that is nothing like what she grew up with, flourished with, or made her history in, the truth is nothing bows to here. The ones who do, are merely those who are doomed to suffer, but the land and hellborn of the realm, do no such thing. Instead they laugh at her. Mock her. Point fingers or hiss or glare. The terrain, from it's lava rivers and this sea of blood, does not care for her existence being made known here.

Nothing leans to her. Flowers do not grow here. Insects do not hover and glow near her. Mankind does not leave offersing or prayers when her light enters a room. It is a truth the sun goddess does not admit. She never could. Not now, not ever.

Scorpion holds no restraint in the truth. The reality of what this world is. The way the realm does not bow or incline towards her atomic luminescence. How she radiates life and tenderness. Instead as he speaks, gesturing to the crimson sea, of the doomed gods who cannot be named, lost to this realm, because of their arrogance and ignorance of what they did not know.

Olivia is ready to argue. Again ready to retaliate and return to why they had separated to begin with. Why Olivia walked away, huffing, refusing to stand next to the undead warrior because of that overbearing bluntness she used to admire when he was the grandmaster. Her hand that rests at Scorpion's gauntlet twitching, almost trembling, as the gold in her sapphire eyes begins to spread throughout the iris. To pull her elbow away from the weathered, ash stained fingertips of the specter who dares to insult her the way he does.

Doubting her. Saying that she is like the other gods and goddesses, when that is not true, when her immorality goes beyond Earthrealm itself, and the sun goddess scoffs, ready to take a step back-

Desert flower.

Golden eyes widen when she hears the name. An informal title. One that mirrors, no, harmonizes with the one she has given Scorpion in nearly every conversation they'd held together.

Olivia looks up at Scorpion now. No longer downcast or angered. The shift in his tone. The softness, one the woman has not felt in what feels years of traveling with each other, slips out. He does not look at the sun goddess when he says this, still gesturing out to the Sea of Blood, and Olivia leans back slightly when he does turn fully back to her.

All that fury, all the annoyance, of this man stabbing at her pride, of speaking her the truth when most would rather give her a comfortable lie, melts away. The name, one Olivia knows does not come from endearment, because it could never be that, causes her heart to flutter.

Desert flower. The blossom that a desert thorn will always protect. Olivia can see in behind those bright sapphire eyes the cluster of soft yellows petals, the glaucous-green of the cacti, and the sharp elegant brown of the thorns. Without the thorns, to protect the blossom from wildlife and threats, to allow the plant to thrive in the hot dusty land of the west that she loves.

You are not mine to protect. Then why does he call her a desert flower? Why does Scorpion, a man who only protects the past, his goal, and what he wishes to bring justice of, say this to her? The grip on her elbow does not weaken and Olivia does not push him away as intended. He speaks of how he has never doubted her light, of who she is, but he has doubted others and the world around them. Signifying the seriousness of what lies within the abyss of the watery grave the sun goddess might've given herself.

Scorpion would not protect her, nor if she his to protect, yet here he is. Holding her elbow. Becoming a wall between the doom she almost created for her and refusing to lie to her about the truth of this world. The softness, the unique name, the actions, are all overwhelming for Olivia right now.

She gulps. Heat spreading to her face. The gold that was once in her iris, in those pupils that are now dilating in excitement as the white of his pale gaze meets her, spreads to her cheeks instead.

The sun goddess is blushing. At a silly name that should not exist between them. The hold it carries on Olivia and the dozens of questions it creating within her mind and heart. She bites her lip, hiding that pout, and exhales sharply as Olivia allows the only words that come to mind right now to what he's said.

"You-"

She begins. Annoyed and flustered. The hand at his gauntlets moves away but the woman in the gilded robes does not step back. Olivia allows Scorpion to be the barrier between the sea of crying souls and her divinity, realizing that she was holding no interest in continuing the argument with such a stubborn being.

"-insufferable, hardheaded man. Speaking to me in such a way. With.. with words that do not make sense." Desert flower. The name is a soft prayer in her thoughts now. A core memory that will never diminish. The shimmer of gold on her cheeks do not falter and she does nothing to hide them, unable to even if she wanted it. "I wish to leave this place. Now. Away from this Sea of Blood. Take me somewhere else. I do not wish to hear the whispers of the poor souls I cannot save nor do I deserve a lecture from a unconcerned man such as yourself, Scorpion."

This is its own form of mercy - the deliberate withholding of observation from a man who observes everything, who has catalogued every shift in her expression since she first arrived in this realm with the careless confidence of something that has never been told no by the universe, who has noted without comment the precise way the gold migrates from iris to cheek when her composure encounters something it did not prepare a defense for.

He files it away in the same place he files the trembling of her hand at his gauntlet. The way she bites her lip rather than let the smile or the fury or the unnamed third thing find its full shape on her face. The way desert flower landed - he felt it, the landing, in the almost imperceptible change in the pressure of her hand over his, a thing so small that only a man paying absolute attention would register it.

Hanzo Hasashi has been paying absolute attention.

He does not examine why.

Insufferable.

Hardheaded.

The words arrive with all the force of a woman who has redirected the full momentum of her fury because the target shifted unexpectedly beneath her, because the argument she had assembled with such architectural precision developed a crack at its foundation - desert flower - and now she is working very hard to remain upright in the rubble of her own composure.

He turns from her.

Not away - never dismissively away, that is not the grammar of this, and she has learned enough of his particular language by now to understand the difference. He turns forward, in the direction that is away from the Sea of Blood, the direction that his body now orients as naturally as a compass finding north, because the north in this equation is away from the thing that would devour her and this is the orientation he has chosen and will not be moved from.

His grip on her elbow shifts. Not releasing. Adjusting. The gauntleted hand moves from the restraining hold - the hold that says stop, stay, do not approach the edge - into something that is adjacent to guidance, that is almost but not precisely escort, that occupies the careful neutral territory between protection and possession that he has been navigating since she arrived in his realm with her golden robes and her terrible, beautiful certainty.

He begins to walk.

"There is," he says, and his voice has returned to its default register - smoke through stone, deliberate, unhurried, carrying the particular quality of a man who does not fill silence out of discomfort but enters it only when the words have earned their passage - "only one direction worth traveling in the Netherrealm."

The crimson wasteland stretches in every direction that is not the way he walks. Lava rivers pulse in the middle distance, the slow arterial rhythm of a realm that is alive in the way wounds are alive - not with growth but with relentless, unceasing, indifferent activity. The sky burns its permanent red overhead. Nothing softens. Nothing yields.

He does not apologize for any of this.

"The Krossroads."

He says the word the way men say the names of places that cost them everything and gave them something in return that cannot be named with the same vocabulary as loss - weighted with history, with the specific complicated ownership of a man who built something from nothing in the worst possible conditions and has never fully reconciled the pride of that with the grief of why it was necessary.

"It is where the Netherrealm ends," he continues, not looking at her as they walk, his masked face oriented forward with the unyielding directness of something that knows exactly where it is going because there is, as he has said, only one direction worth traveling, "and where everything that has survived the Netherrealm begins."

The landscape shifts as they move - or rather, he moves through it with the ease of a creature for whom this terrain holds no mystery, no threat, no capacity for surprise, a man who has mapped every inch of this particular damnation through the sheer accumulation of years, and she moves beside him with the adjusted gait of someone who has learned, slowly, grudgingly, that his pace through Hell is the correct pace and her instinct to stride forward into whatever comes next must be tempered by the knowledge that what comes next in this realm is frequently catastrophic.

He is aware of her beside him the way he is aware of the hellfire - constantly, without effort, the awareness not requiring active attention because it has become ambient, a baseline condition of his current existence that he has stopped cataloguing as unusual and started cataloguing simply as present.

She is flushed still. He knows this without looking.

He does not look.

"The voices will not follow to the Krossroads," he tells her, and this is practical information delivered in the practical register of a man who deals in practical information because sentiment is a currency he spends carefully and only when the exchange rate justifies the expenditure - "it is the one place in this realm where the hunger of it does not reach. Not because the darkness is absent. Because something has been built that the darkness has not yet found a way to consume."

A pause.

In the pause, the sound of the Sea of Blood diminishes - those ancient whispering mouths in languages she will not tell him she understands falling away behind them with each deliberate step he takes, each step that is in some fundamental sense his answer to everything the Netherrealm attempts, the answer being simply: forward, again, still, despite everything, forward.

"You wished to save those souls," he says, and the words arrive without judgment, without the edge of I told you that a smaller man might permit himself after watching his warning proven correct - he does not require her to be wrong, has no investment in her error beyond the single consuming investment of she does not become one of them - "I understand the wish."

He understands it the way he understands the architecture of grief from the inside. The way he understands the specific torment of standing at the edge of suffering you cannot reach and having to choose between the doomed impulse to throw yourself into it and the terrible discipline of turning away.

"At the Krossroads, you will see what becomes of those who were saved in time."

Not a consolation. He does not traffic in consolations, which are soft-edged things that ask the wounded to feel better about wounds that have not healed. He offers instead a fact - a hard-edged, obsidian-solid fact - that carries within it something that functions like hope without requiring the vulnerability of naming it that.

The Krossroads appears on the horizon before they arrive - it always does, as though the place announces itself to those who carry in them the quality of endurance, as though the black glass towers and the steady burning beacon of the Guardian's own hellfire recognize something in the approach of those who have survived what should not be survivable.

He stops at the threshold.

Old habit. The pause at the boundary between the wasteland and the sanctuary, the moment of this is what I have built, this is what I have chosen, this is the only answer I have ever had to offer that he does not perform for audiences but cannot fully suppress because it lives in his body now, this pause, this breath of acknowledgment.

He releases her elbow.

The release is deliberate. A restoration of her autonomy at the moment it can be safely restored, which is a thing he will never say aloud - I held on until I could let go safely - because it would require admitting the holding was never mere restraint, was never only about the Sea and its hunger.

"Insufferable," he says.

Quietly.

Almost to himself.

The word is not an argument. It is not a rebuttal. It arrives with the particular quality of a man turning something over in his mind and finding it - against all reasonable expectation, against the long austere logic of his own survival - something adjacent to warmth.

"You are welcome," he adds, "to call me that."

He steps across the threshold of the Krossroads without looking back, the hellfire framing him in orange-gold, the permanent beacon of him burning steady and undiminished against the Netherrealm's eternal dark.

He does not check whether she follows.

She will follow or she will not. He has said what needed saying. He has moved her from the Sea's edge to the one place in all of Hell's geography where the light she carries will not be simply swallowed but will have, perhaps, something worth illuminating.

He has done what he does.

He endures. He builds. He tends the flame and trusts that those who need the warmth will find their way toward it, because that is the only theology available to a man who has buried his certainties one by one and found, in the bare earth after, that something still grew.

The Krossroads receives them both.

The crimson sky burns overhead, indifferent as always.

Scorpion holds her elbow the entire way.

It is not a nurturing hold, for the sun goddess is aware this warrior of hellfire, does not always carry such aspects within him. The tenderness that she holds for most around her, in her words and her touch, is not shown in the same way Scorpion guides her right now.

Still. There is a softness in the way he leads. The way he guides her, firm and strict, refusing to allow his hold on her to weaken or strengthen. It is in this that Olivia realizes something. It hits her, in the same way the new title of 'desert flower' strikes her.

She has never been guided before. This sun goddess, in her radiance and power, has never allowed this to happen. For she, a daughter of the sun itself, was raised and taught that she must be the one to guide. To guide the sun, that creator of light and life, across the Earth. To guide others, those who worship and seek her advice, without so much as a thought that the goddess would ever need guidance in return.

And now this warrior, of hellfire and bones, of chains and swords, does the very thing that Olivia had never thought was possible. It does not leave her feeling helpless. As one might feel when being guided in a land that is unfamiliar. More so for a goddess who holds a pride that cannot be easily overcome.

She will not speak of this. Refusing to allow Scorpion to be aware of the irony. That a woman, this being who holds divinity, born to be the one who guides the sun itself, must be directed on the right path in this realm. That is where her pride simmers, for she fears that Scorpion might hold this fact over her, the way others within the NetherRealm might.

They continue on, walking side by side on the ruins that is the path to the north. This path they take, is a smooth one, and Olivia is wondering if Scorpion had chosen such a route to avoid further threats or because those who know who the warrior is merely avoid the trail they take.

Whatever it is, the sun goddess is silently relieved of this, still flustered by his words. By what is happening between them in this journey. To this 'place' where the NetherRealm ends.

The Krossroads. A place Olivia has not heard of, not truly, because this is a land she is still unfamiliar with. Scorpion explains this place, how it is worth traveling, and it is a truth she believes of the warrior. He held no reason to be dishonest after all, not after they time they have spent together and his warnings that she cannot just come and go as she pleases within this realm that holds more than it's fair share of traps in it's hellish landscape.

Survived the NertherRealms. A place that must be the only safe haven, if one can call it that, within this world where her sun does not exist. The voices, the ones that had urged her towards the Sea of Blood, will not be there to vex her. To entice her towards a sea with no bottom. This is but another bit of relief, as Olivia turns a moment to glance behind her shoulder, seeing that the sea is long gone and that the voices had indeed faded away the closer they go towards the Krossroads.

"You wished to save those souls, I understand the wish."

Those words. This admission and honesty has Olivia turn back to look towards Scorpion with widen eyes. Her elbow still held by him. Still guiding her. Yet he does not look to her, not even a glance, after he says this. That somewhere within the hellfire of who he is, that vengeance and wrath, there is someone within him who once wished to save those souls within the Sea of Blood. Just as she wished to do.

Olivia does not frown nor does she smile at what she hears. Instead she contemplates, allowing what Scorpion has said to sit with her thoughts, hoping they might calm the gentle moniker he had called her earlier. She tries not overthink it, of Scorpion wishing to save the fallen souls, listening as he explains that this is what happens to those who saved in time, merely stating a fact, and it is one the sun goddess cannot help but feel a bit of solace from that. That not all of those who are doomed to the NetherRealm become tortured or forever drowning in this place.

That, even in this realm that some would say is hell itself, there is refuge.

The pair stop, standing at the threshold of the Krossroads, and it is in this pause that the sun goddess is able to see the location told of. The large pillars of stone rock, and she is certain is bone, stretching as far as she can see, pooled with rivers and craters of lava. Sapphire eyes glance over the space, seeing the bridge in the distance, and the few towers that encircle within it.

It is… a spectacle. Horrendous and blackened. Yet the sun goddess hears no souls whispering to her. No screams or cries of spirits that cling to her inner psyche. All Olivia can hear is the lava rumbling, the distance pained cries of those in combat, and the screeches of winged NetherRealm beasts, who seem to have created nests in the area of the Krossroads.

Olivia does not step away when Scorpion releases her elbow. The weight, the warmth, of his hand disappears against her, and the woman cannot help but feel a weird uncomfortable sensation of longing. That wishes that the warrior hadn't released her.

Desert flower. The name echoes again through her mind. Far louder than the sounds around them at the threshold of the Krossroads. This name, unsure of what it means, aside from it being a mirroring to her own desert thorn, will be left to silence now.

Questioning Scorpion would only open a new conversation. A new world of what this alliance is as specter and divinity. And Olivia cannot help but find that this bothers her internally, only because she knows that Scorpion is not someone who stays concerned with those who wish to make an argument of it.

What she does do, is answer his own statement, with her own. Following him as he walks away, that she is allowed to continue to call him insufferable, because if the sun goddess is one thing, is that she is stubborn to a fault.

"Then you are welcome to call me…." Olivia pauses, sulking, glancing away as she is side by side with Scorpion as they walk into the Krossroads, huffing. "… whatever seems fit."

She does not know if she will Scorpion insufferable again. Maybe, if her mood has risen to a fury or if she cannot help but be frustrated with the specter. All Olivia knows the day it does happen, it will at least be a day that she knows it will end the same way this one has. With a headstrong, glowing, flustering, sun goddess who cannot understand or read the warrior of hellfire as easily as she thought she would.

All Olivia knows right now, as she continues with him, is that that same hellfire, which has always burned fiercely and powerful, becomes a shade warmer. She does not know and she does not ask. Allowing it to merely be.

"Why is this a place where the NertherRealm ends?" Changing the subject, almost too quickly, as she glances up towards the pillars of rock and metal. "I did not know it was possible for it to end."

𝐆𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐒 𝐎𝐍𝐈𝐎𝐍*

Writing / roleplay prompts based on quotes collected from the script of the movie Glass Onion (2022).

❝ You can tell him no. ❞

❝ You can't keep making excuses for his every insane whim! ❞

❝ Genius always looks like insanity at first, though, right? ❞

❝ How can you argue with that? ❞

❝ Please stop fire spinning inside! ❞

❝ You agreed, no phone for the rest of the media cycle. ❞

❝ Alright genius, what is this thing? ❞

❝ There's gotta be a way to open it right? ❞

❝ Let's be honest, breasts are fun. ❞

❝ I love my boobs, they're super fun. ❞

❝ What'd I tell you about touching my stuff! ❞

❝ Is something supposed to happen? ❞

❝ Are you mocking me? ❞

❝ When you layer this tune on top of itself it starts to change and turns in to a beautiful new structure. ❞

❝ We could all use a moment of normalcy. ❞

❝ I know you're saying words but they mean nothing to me, absolute gibberish. ❞

❝ I think maybe this game is just not my thing. ❞

❝ I really thought you'd be better at this. ❞

❝ You're not in the bath again are you? ❞

❝ My mind is a fueled up racing car and I've nowhere to drive it. ❞

❝ I need danger, the hunt, a challenge. ❞

❝ We need to talk. Just us. ❞

❝ You need a hand? ❞

❝ Did you two stay at the hotel last night? ❞

❝ I don't even know what that means. ❞

❝ What an extraordinary gathering. ❞

❝ You must be very special. ❞

❝ I love this material, what is this? ❞

❝ I could not help but notice a stir at her arrival. ❞

❝ Are they no longer partners? ❞

❝ Look at your face; it was worth it. ❞

❝ I cannot overstate my gratitude for the invitation. ❞

❝ We've got quite a weekend coming. ❞

❝ This rich people shit is weird. ❞

❝ It's past, present, future. What came before me, what I am, what I leave to the world. ❞

❝ How big a staff does it take to run this place? ❞

❝ This is a normal weekend with old friends. ❞

❝ I really am glad you are here. ❞

❝ I wanted to ask. What are you doing here? ❞

❝ I've learned through bitter experience that an anonymous invitation is not to be trifled with. ❞

❝ You really try, that's what I like. You make an effort. ❞

❝ Well. I am on vacation. ❞

❝ You never know when shit's going to go down. ❞

❝ I'll take care of him. Don't worry. ❞

❝ I can't believe I'm talking to you. ❞

❝ I think disruptors recognize each other. ❞

❝ You've used that word before, what does that mean? ❞

❝ I say it like I see it. ❞

❝ Your world is about to change. ❞

❝ It's a dangerous thing isn't it, to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth. ❞

❝ Are you calling me dangerous? ❞

❝ Something's off. I don't like this. ❞

❝ You know every time we've gotten to the point I am going to strangle you, you pull something like this and it's magic. ❞

❝ I want to be responsible for something that gets mentioned in the same breath as the Mona Lisa, forever. ❞

❝ Do you know what this is? ❞

❝ This is reckless, and you are going to get somebody killed. ❞

❝ I thought maybe there was a prize or something. ❞

❝ You've done some homework. ❞

❝ He doesn't know about that. ❞

❝ It's all fake smiles and agendas, people wanting what they think they're owed. ❞

❝ God, I miss that bar. ❞

❝ I'm leaving. In the morning. ❞

❝ You're murdering my vibe. ❞

❝ Are we even going to talk about the elephant in the room? ❞

❝ Given the circumstances I think that's a fair question. ❞

❝ Are you really asking me that? ❞

❝ What do you want? You want a check? Performative pity? ❞

❝ I want the truth. ❞

❝ Dance with me, pretty lady. ❞

❝ You’ve gotta see this. ❞

❝ This changes things right? ❞

❝ Everything works out in the end, you've just got to keep the faith. ❞

❝ Have I ever let you down? ❞

❝ What the hell just happened?! ❞

❝ I'll do it - how do I do it? ❞

❝ I only need one last piece of information. ❞

❝ It's time to finish this. ❞

❝ Why don't we start at the beginning? ❞

❝ I'm going to use it to burn his whole empire down. ❞

❝ It's a stupid idea right? ❞

❝ I'll take those odds. ❞

❝ They will certainly not hesitate to kill again. ❞

❝ One of those shit heads killed my sister. ❞

❝ I shouldn't be here, this is nuts. But I'm here so let's do this. ❞

❝ I'm not great on boats. ❞

❝ What's that you are working on? ❞

❝ I can't let you do this. ❞

❝ This is your last chance to back out. ❞

❝ You shouldn't be here. ❞

❝ That's a beautiful necklace. ❞

❝ He's a good guy. He's complicated. ❞

❝ Why do you put up with it? ❞

❝ It's expeditious but kind of a shit show. ❞

❝ Go easy there—I thought you didn't drink? ❞

❝ I think you should maybe lie down. ❞

❝ We're running out of time! ❞

❝ Please remember the danger here. ❞

❝ Step back, let me handle it. ❞

❝ Oh now you want to talk about it? ❞

❝ You didn't even write back. ❞

❝ Where the hell were you? ❞

❝ Can you say all that one more time? ❞

❝ If I had answered the door that night, what would you have told me? ❞

❝ Something ... something is teasing the edge of my brain. ❞

❝ Are you going to do it for me? ❞

❝ I'll do what I have to do to save myself. ❞

❝ He's a bastard. I'm not sorry for him, he deserved it. ❞

❝ You're better off without him. ❞

❝ She did not see the real threat, the obvious threat, until it was too late. ❞

❝ Oh, you brainless jackass! ❞

❝ Your one murder with any panache at all and you stole the whole idea from me! ❞

❝ Why didn't you burn it or something? ❞

❝ Gotcha, you son of a bitch. ❞

❝ It's your version of the truth against mine. Let's see how that goes. ❞

❝ Your sister was a complicated woman and she meant the world to me. ❞

❝ You go girl! ❞

❝ Yeah. Why the hell not. ❞

❝ Goddamn that felt good. ❞

❝ You feel better now? ❞

❝ You will forever be remembered in the same breath as the Mona Lisa. ❞