I don't want to remember

I'mSorryI'mSorryI'mSorryI'mSorryI'mSorryI'mSorry

It hurts so much

Not only did I lose the person I am in love with. I lost my best friend of almost 14 years. I lost my favorite person. The person I feel like myself with. My other half. My soulmate.

𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝟎𝟎𝟐 ❝ angry confessions ❞ edition || @survivics || accepting

💥|| The mission parameters were simple on paper - extract the asset, neutralize the threat, exfiltrate before dawn painted the warehouse district in shades of exposure. Hanzo Hasashi moves through the skeletal remains of the industrial complex like smoke given murderous purpose, his tactical boots silent against concrete still warm from the day's absorbed heat. Behind him, his team flows in practiced formation, a constellation of lethal precision held together by hand signals and the kind of trust that only forms when you've bled together in places that don't exist on any official map.

The asset - a terrified accountant who'd made the catastrophic mistake of discovering where certain funds flowed - huddles between Anderson and Takeda, her whimpering muffled by the sound-dampening headphones they'd placed over her ears. Hanzo's jaw tightens. Civilian extractions always carry additional variables, unpredictable elements that can transform a clean operation into a bloodbath with a single panicked scream.

"Clear left," comes Kwon's voice through the earpiece, barely a whisper of static.

"Clear right," Rodriguez confirms.

But Hanzo's instincts - those battle-sharpened senses that have kept him breathing through seventeen years of operations that officially never happened - scream warning. Something tastes wrong in the air, metallic and electric, like the moment before lightning splits the sky. His hand rises in a closed fist. Stop.

The team freezes.

That's when he sees it - the tripwire, nearly invisible fishing line stretched taut across their exit path, connected to something that makes his blood crystallize in his veins. The device is crude but effective, packed with enough C-4 to turn the corridor into a concrete coffin.

"Back. Now. Different route - "

The accountant's sob-hiccup turns into a stumble. Takeda reaches for her, but momentum and terror are a deadly combination. She lurches forward.

Time becomes elastic, stretching and compressing simultaneously. Hanzo sees the trajectory, calculates the outcome in the microsecond before it happens - the tripwire catching her ankle, the mechanism triggering, the explosion's radius that will consume her, consume Takeda who's too close, consume Anderson who's already moving to help.

He doesn't think. Thinking is what gets people killed.

Hanzo launches himself forward, shoulder checking Takeda sideways, his other arm hooking the accountant's waist and hurling her backward toward Rodriguez. The tripwire snaps. The world becomes light and sound and fury.

The explosion hits him like the fist of an angry god, a concussive wave that turns his skeleton into a tuning fork vibrating at frequencies bone was never meant to withstand. He feels himself lifted, weightless for a suspended heartbeat, before physics reasserts its cruel dominion and slams him into the support pillar eight feet away.

The impact against concrete is a symphony of destruction - ribs cracking with sounds like green wood breaking, air evacuating his lungs in a violent expulsion, his head snapping back hard enough that stars explode behind his eyelids. Pain arrives in layers; first the sharp, immediate agony of fractured bone, then the deep, grinding ache of trauma that radiates through his entire torso, finally the wet heat that suggests internal bleeding, organs bruised and weeping.

Consciousness flickers. Dims. The world reduces to fragments - Rodriguez screaming his name, the chemical stink of explosive residue, the taste of copper flooding his mouth, the curious sensation of his body trying to remember how to perform basic functions like breathing.

Black.

He surfaces to voices, urgent and overlapping. Hands on him, too many hands, checking pulses and injuries with the efficient brutality of battlefield triage. Someone's applying pressure to his side - Anderson, he thinks, recognizing the callused grip - while Kwon's face swims into focus above him, lips moving in words that arrive three seconds delayed.

" - stay with us, Commander. Evac's two minutes out. You hear me? Two fucking minutes, so don't you dare - "

Hanzo tries to speak, manages only a wet cough that sends fresh agony cascading through his ribcage. Everything hurts. Everything. His body has become a map of pain, each nerve ending reporting damage in insistent, screaming detail.

"Ribs are broken, at least three, maybe more," Rodriguez reports, her voice tight with controlled fear. "Probable concussion. Internal bleeding likely. We need to move him now."

They do, and the movement is its own special hell. Hanzo's vision whites out, then returns in nauseating pulses. The exfiltration happens in disjointed snapshots - the helicopter's rotors beating the air like war drums, the medic's face stark with concentration as she starts an IV line, the accountant sobbing somewhere behind him that she's sorry, so sorry.

He wants to tell her it's not her fault. Wants to explain that this is what he does, what he's always done - absorb the impact, take the hit, ensure others survive even if it costs him pieces of himself he'll never get back. But his tongue feels thick, foreign, and the morphine they've pushed into his system is turning his thoughts to honey.

The last thing he registers before unconsciousness claims him again is the medic murmuring to someone on comms; "Get his emergency contact ready. This one's going to need someone when he wakes up."

Three days later, Hanzo discharges himself against medical advice.

The doctors protest - a chorus of stern disapproval about fractured ribs needing time to heal, about the danger of internal complications, about pain management and proper recovery protocols. He signs the papers with his left hand because his right side screams every time he attempts fine motor control, and walks out of the military medical facility with bandages wrapped so tightly around his torso that each breath requires conscious effort.

His apartment feels like a tomb when he enters it - sterile, dark, containing nothing that speaks of a life actually lived. Just tactical gear neatly organized, weapons cleaned and secured, a bed that serves as a place to lose consciousness between missions. No photographs. No mementos. Nothing that could be used as leverage if enemies ever discovered where the commander of Special Forces Tactical Unit Seven actually sleeps.

Nothing except the small paper bag on his kitchen counter, grease-stained and familiar, containing a matcha croissant that's now three days stale.

He'd stopped at her bakery the morning of the mission. Had told himself it was just convenient, that the café happened to be on his route, that the way Sakura's face lit up when he walked through the door meant nothing more than good customer service. Had listened to her chatter about a new recipe she was developing while his mind was already in the warehouse, already calculating angles and exits and acceptable casualties.

She'd touched his hand when passing him the bag, her fingers lingering just a fraction too long. "Be safe," she'd said, and something in her eyes suggested she understood more than a bakery owner should about the kind of safe he might need to be. He'd left without acknowledging it. Without giving her anything to hold onto. Because that's the protocol, the tactical necessity - maintain distance, ensure no attachments, create no vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

Now, standing in his empty apartment with ribs that grind and shift with every breath, that stale croissant feels like an accusation.

His phone vibrates. A text from Rodriguez; She's been calling the unit line every six hours asking if you're okay. Brass is getting annoyed. Handle it.

Hanzo stares at the message, something cold and sharp twisting beneath his bandaged sternum that has nothing to do with fractured bone. She knows. Somehow, she knows. Has she been calling since the night of the mission? Has she been losing sleep, imagining worst-case scenarios, worrying about a man who's done everything possible to keep her at arm's length?

The tactical response is clear; don't engage. Let her worry fade into relief when he doesn't answer, let the silence communicate what his words have failed to - that he's not worth the investment of her concern.

But Hanzo has never been good at following his own tactical advice when it comes to Sakura.

He goes to her.

It's a mistake, he knows this even as his Ducati growls to life beneath him, even as pain radiates through his torso with every gear shift, even as he navigates the evening traffic toward the bakery district where flour dust and hope seem to perfume the very air. Every rational part of his brain - the parts trained through countless operations to assess risk and minimize exposure - screams that this is tactically unsound. That showing up injured, vulnerable, will only deepen whatever attachment she's developing. That the kindest thing he can do is disappear, let her believe he's fine, maintain the fiction that he's invulnerable.

But he's so tired of being kind through absence.

The bakery is closed when he arrives, but light glows warm through the windows, and he knows she's inside doing the endless prep work that transforms raw ingredients into the small miracles she sells each morning. He parks the bike, and the simple act of dismounting becomes an exercise in controlled agony, each movement a negotiation with his damaged body.

His hand rises to knock, but the door opens before knuckles meet wood.

Sakura stands there, and the expression on her face - relief and fury and fear and something fiercer than all of them combined - nearly drives him back a step. She's wearing her work apron, flour dusting her cheek, her hair escaping its bun in ways that suggest she's been running agitated fingers through it for hours. Her eyes perform their own tactical assessment, cataloguing the too-careful way he holds himself, the pallor beneath his tan, the bandages she can somehow sense even beneath his leather jacket.

"Inside," she says, and it's not a request.

He complies because defying her seems more dangerous than facing down armed hostiles. The bakery smells like vanilla and butter and cinnamon - smells that have no place in his world of cordite and blood and fear-sweat. She locks the door behind him, flips the sign to ensure privacy, then turns to face him with arms crossed and jaw set in a way that reminds him, absurdly, of his old drill sergeant.

"I called," she says, each word deliberate. "Fourteen times. They kept telling me there was no information available about your unit. Then Rodriguez finally answered and told me you were 'recovering from a training accident.'" Her fingers make aggressive air quotes. "A training accident, Hanzo. She thought I was stupid enough to believe that."

"You should believe it," he says, and his voice comes out rougher than intended, abraded by pain and exhaustion. "It's the official story."

"The official story is bullshit." She moves closer, and he can see the shadows beneath her eyes, the evidence of sleep sacrificed to worry. "You're hurt. Really hurt. I can see it in the way you're breathing, the way you're holding your right side like something inside might fall out if you move wrong."

She's too observant. Too intelligent. Too everything that makes keeping her safe through distance an impossible task.

"It's just bruised ribs," he lies, and watches her eyes flash with anger.

"Don't. Don't you dare minimize this to me." Her voice cracks, and that fracture in her composure does more damage than the explosion ever could. "I've watched you limp in here for three months now, each time with new injuries you pretend don't exist. Split knuckles you claim came from 'training.' A black eye you blamed on 'sparring.' That scar on your neck that mysteriously appeared and you said was from 'an accident with equipment.'"

She's catalogued every wound. Every mark. Has been building a case file of his damage while he thought he was being subtle.

"I do what needs to be done," he says, falling back on the mission statement that's sustained him through seventeen years of impossible operations. "Sometimes that requires sacrifice."

"And what about me?" The question emerges quiet, devastating. "What about what I need? Do I not get a say in whether I want to care about someone who treats his own life like it's disposable?"

The tactical response rises automatically to his lips - push her away, give her every reason to retreat to safety, dismantle this attachment before it becomes leverage his enemies can use. He's done it before, perfected the art of driving people away for their own protection. He's a master of strategic withdrawal from anything resembling intimacy.

But Sakura is standing there with flour on her cheek and devastation in her eyes and her hands are shaking slightly, and Hanzo realizes that he's already failed at keeping her distant. That she's already invested, already entangled, already vulnerable to exactly the kind of pain he was trying to prevent.

"You should walk away," he tells her, forcing steel into his voice even as something in his chest cavity - something that has nothing to do with fractured ribs - constricts painfully. "Find someone who comes home every night. Someone who doesn't have nightmares about things he can't talk about. Someone who can actually give you a future that doesn't involve middle-of-the-night calls informing you that I didn't make it back from a mission that officially never happened."

She stares at him for a long moment, and he watches her process his words, watches her face cycle through emotions too quickly to categorize. Then she moves, closing the distance between them with determined steps.

"No," she says simply.

The word hangs between them like a challenge.

"No?" he repeats, genuinely confused because people don't usually refuse when he gives them permission to save themselves.

"No," she confirms, and now she's close enough that he can see the gold flecks in her brown eyes, can smell the cinnamon that clings to her hair, can feel the warmth radiating from her body that reminds him he's still capable of feeling cold. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm too in love with you to leave, Hanzo Hasashi, and you're going to have to work a lot harder than that to scare me off."

The confession hits him harder than the explosion did.

The commander's jaw tightens, a muscle feathering beneath scarred skin as her words pierce through the carefully constructed armor he wears better than any Kevlar vest could ever manage. His dark eyes - those twin abysses that have witnessed horrors no bakery owner should ever have to comprehend, that have catalogued death in all its variations, that have gone flat and cold while pulling triggers that ended lives - flicker with something dangerous, something raw and bleeding that he immediately tries to cauterize with cold tactical precision.

He turns on his heel, the movement sharp despite the white-hot lance of agony that shoots through his ribcage, each breath a reminder of concrete and fire and the split-second where consciousness abandoned him to darkness. The bandages wrapped around his torso pull taut beneath his tactical shirt, a mummy's binding that can't quite contain all the fractured pieces trying to escape their cage of damaged bone. He can feel them shifting, grinding, each one a small knife cutting from the inside.

"Love," he rasps, and the word tastes like copper and cordite on his tongue, like all the things he's tried to forget the flavor of, "is a luxury afforded to those who don't calculate kill zones over morning coffee." His voice drops lower, becomes gravel and broken glass scraped across concrete. "You deserve someone whose hands can knead dough without remembering how easily throats collapse under proper pressure. Someone who doesn't flinch at car backfires because they sound too much like small arms fire. Someone who doesn't carry the weight of seventeen tombstones in his chest pocket - boys who followed his orders and came home in flag-draped boxes."

He watches her with the same intensity he'd use to identify threats in a hot zone - cataloguing the tremor in her fingers that suggests adrenaline, the way her pupils dilate with stubborn determination rather than fear, the microscopic tension around her eyes that betrays sleepless nights and worry that's burrowed into her marrow like shrapnel that can't be extracted. She's terrified, he realizes. Not of him, but for him. The distinction makes something crack inside his sternum that has nothing to do with fractured ribs, something that feels suspiciously like the foundations of the walls he's built around anything resembling vulnerability.

"I'm dismantling you," he warns, each word deliberate, surgical, deployed with the same precision he'd use to field-strip a weapon in darkness. "Giving you every reason to walk away. Every tactical advantage. Every exit strategy." His hand finds the motorcycle's handlebar, knuckles whitening around chrome that's warm from the engine. "Because that's what I do - I assess, I strategize, I neutralize threats before they metastasize into something that can cause catastrophic damage."

He takes a step toward the Ducati, and the movement sends fresh agony cascading through his torso. His vision whites out at the edges, but he forces himself to remain upright, to maintain the illusion of invulnerability even as his body screams that he needs to be horizontal, needs medical attention, needs to stop pretending that he's anything other than a man held together by bandages and stubbornness.

"I will always be hurt," he continues, and now there's something almost confessional in his tone, a crack in the tactical facade. "Figuratively and literally. Metaphorically and physically. Persistent aches that wake me at 3 AM. Injuries that accumulate faster than they heal. Pain that's become so constant I've forgotten what it feels like to exist without it." His free hand unconsciously moves to his ribs, pressing against the bandages as if he can somehow contain the damage through pressure alone. "Despair that follows me like a shadow because I know - I know - that every mission might be the one where luck runs out and I don't come back."

He swings his leg over the motorcycle, and the motion is agony given physical form. Something in his ribs shifts wrongly, and he has to bite down on the sound that wants to escape his throat. Can't show weakness. Can't give her ammunition to use in arguing that he needs to stay, needs help, needs her.

But even as the words form his defensive perimeter, even as he constructs this fortress of brutal honesty meant to drive her back to the safety of a life that doesn't include him, his other hand betrays him. It hovers near his side, fingers curling inward as if reaching for something - someone - he's convinced himself he doesn't deserve to touch. His body knows what his mind refuses to acknowledge: that he wants her to stay, desperately, with an intensity that terrifies him more than any firefight ever has.

"And it pains me," he admits, the confession dragged from some deep bunker within himself that he'd thought permanently sealed, booby-trapped, marked with warning signs that no one should ever attempt to access. His voice fractures, splintering into something almost human, something that sounds like the man he might have been if he'd chosen different paths. "It destroys me, Sakura. Because every time I limp away from you, every time I choose the mission over the moment, every time I prioritize tactical objectives over the way you make those goddamn matcha croissants that I pretend not to crave but dream about when I'm in godforsaken deserts waiting for targets to appear - "

He stops. Swallows hard. The motorcycle engine roars to life between his thighs, vibration traveling up his damaged spine like a second heartbeat, primal and insistent. The sound is too loud in the quiet street, drowning out everything except the pounding of his pulse in his ears and the ragged rhythm of his breathing.

" - I'm leaving pieces of myself behind in that bakery. On your countertop where you put my coffee without me having to order because you've memorized how I take it. In the spaces between your words when you talk about your day and I contribute nothing because I can't tell you about mine. In the way you look at me like I'm something other than a weapon occasionally given human form." His eyes lock onto hers, and for one unguarded instant, she sees it all - the longing that he's tried to bury under operational priorities, the fear that caring about her makes her a liability, the terrible knowledge that he's simultaneously pushing her away and praying she'll prove immovable. "So fight me. Please. Please, Sakura. Because I'm too much of a coward to stop fighting myself, too broken to believe I deserve this, and too terrified of what it means that you've gotten past every defense I've spent decades perfecting."

The admission hangs between them like smoke from a distant firefight, acrid and impossible to ignore, carrying with it the chemical residue of truth that burns going down.

His hand tightens on the throttle, but he doesn't twist it. Doesn't accelerate away into the night like every tactical instinct is screaming at him to do. Instead, he sits there on his motorcycle, bandaged and bleeding and breaking, waiting to see if she'll let him go or if she'll do what no one else has ever done - refuse to accept his retreat, call his bluff, stand her ground against the self-destructive momentum that's defined his entire adult life.

And in that suspended moment, Hanzo Hasashi - commander of tactical special forces, veteran of operations that will never be declassified, man who's survived things that would shatter most people - realizes that he's more terrified of her answer than he's ever been of any enemy combatant.