#arashikage

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The rain fell in sheets, thick and relentless, turning the derelict warehouse on the industrial edge of Tokyo into a cavern of echoing drips and shifting shadows. Corroded steel beams groaned overhead, and the air smelled of rust, wet concrete, and the faint ozone of distant lightning. You stood motionless in the center of the open floor, your black tactical gear blending with the gloom, heartbeat steady from years of training. Eighteen months of living as a Cobra operative—feeding them just enough real intel to stay alive, climbing ranks, smiling at Destro’s cold calculations, laughing at Baroness’s barbed jokes—had all led to this single night.

You had planted the false lead yourself: an encrypted Cobra channel message claiming the Cobra Agent the woman Storm Shadow had come to call his own, had been snatched by a G.I. Joe strike team during a botched arms deal. You knew he would come. Tommy Arashikage did not leave his people behind, least of all the one he had let past every wall he had ever built.

A faint scrape of boot leather on wet metal—barely audible over the rain—told you he was here. You didn’t move. From the catwalk above, he descended like smoke, white gi stained gray with city grime, twin katanas crossed on his back, hood low over eyes that could cut steel. He landed twenty feet away, scanning the darkness with the predator’s calm that had earned him the name Storm Shadow.

Then he saw you.

Relief flashed across his face so raw it almost hurt to witness. The tension in his shoulders melted; the swords stayed sheathed. He crossed the distance in three silent strides, rain dripping from his hood onto your upturned face.

“My Love,” he breathed, voice low and rough with fear he would never admit to anyone else. His gloved hands rose—slow, careful, as though you were made of porcelain—and cupped your cheeks. “Tell me you are unharmed. I received the transmission—Joe forces, extraction team—God, I thought—”

You let him touch you. Let him search your eyes for the woman he had fallen in love with. Let the moment stretch just long enough for the trap to spring.

Your face remained unreadable. Training. Muscle memory. The mask you had worn for months.

In one fluid motion you twisted inside his guard, palm striking the nerve cluster at his wrist while your other hand swept his legs. He hit the concrete hard, the wet slap echoing like a gunshot. Before he could roll, you had both katanas out of their saya and your knee planted between his shoulder blades. Cold steel handcuffs—Joe-issue, reinforced titanium—snapped around his wrists.

His body went rigid beneath you.

Confusion. Then betrayal. Then something far worse—something that looked like the death of hope.

“Y/N,” he whispered, the name he had only ever used in private now a curse.

The warehouse doors exploded inward. Floodlights sliced through the rain. Duke’s voice cracked over the comms: “Go, go, go!” Thirty Joes in full tactical poured in, rifles up, boots splashing. Roadblock and Lady Jaye flanked the entry, Cover Girl on overwatch. Duke himself strode straight to you, rain streaming off his helmet.

“Outstanding work, Agent,” he said, clapping a gloved hand on your shoulder. “You just bagged the Arashikage’s deadliest ghost. Cobra’s going to feel this one for years.”

Storm Shadow—Tommy—didn’t struggle as they hauled him up. He only looked back at you once as they dragged him toward the waiting armored transport. Rain mixed with the blood from a split lip you hadn’t meant to give him. His dark eyes locked on yours across the chaos, and in them you saw every stolen moment, every whispered promise, every night he had let the mask fall. Then the doors slammed shut and he was gone.

You stood in the downpour, chest hollow, wondering how long it would take for the ache to kill you.

The memory hit you like a blade between the ribs while the transport rumbled away.

Months earlier. Cobra’s underground training complex beneath the Yokohama docks. You had been “recruited” through a carefully forged dossier—ex-special forces, disillusioned with G.I. Joe bureaucracy, looking for a cause that paid better and asked fewer questions. They bought it. Barely.

Your first assignment: shadow the Arashikage for a high-value extraction in the Shinjuku underworld. You expected a cold machine. You met a man who moved like poetry written in violence.

He had tested you immediately. In a rain-slicked alley behind a shuttered ramen shop, two Yakuza enforcers tried to jump the deal. Tommy dispatched them in four heartbeats—silent, efficient, beautiful. You covered his six without being told. When the last man dropped, he turned, mask half-lowered, one eyebrow arched.

“You do not flinch,” he observed, voice like smoke over gravel. “Most new operatives do.”

You shrugged, wiping blood from your cheek. “I’ve seen worse. I’ve done worse.”

He studied you a long moment. Then, almost reluctantly, he offered the smallest nod. “Names are liabilities. But tonight you may call me Tommy.”

That was the first crack in the armor.

Over the next weeks the cracks widened. Late-night strategy sessions in dimly lit safehouses. Shared sake in hidden izakayas where no Cobra insignia showed. He began teaching you Arashikage forms—kata that had never been shared outside the clan. You let him see pieces of the “real” you: fabricated childhood trauma, a fake dead brother, rage at the Joes for abandoning allies. Lies wrapped so tightly around truth that even you sometimes forgot which was which.

Week after week the fracture widened. He taught you the Arashikage breathing forms in a moonlit rooftop garden above Shinjuku, his hands guiding yours through the slow, lethal movements. Every correction was gentle; every praise was quiet and earned. You felt the mission slipping away each time his fingers lingered on your wrist a second longer than necessary. You started waking up reaching for a body that wasn’t supposed to be there. The handler’s voice in your earpiece during check-ins began to sound like static compared to the low rumble of Tommy saying your name like it was the only prayer he still believed in. You were falling. God help you, you were falling so hard the drop felt like flying.

Tokyo alleys became your sanctuary. One night after a brutal raid on a Joe supply cache, adrenaline still singing in your veins, he pulled you into the shadow of a neon-lit pachinko parlor. Rain hissed on the pavement. His hood was back, black hair damp against his forehead, scar across his left cheek gleaming silver.

“You are dangerous,” he murmured, thumb brushing your lower lip. “To Cobra. To me.”

Then he kissed you—slow, deliberate, as though committing the taste to memory. You kissed him back because the mission demanded it. You kissed him back because the ache in your chest demanded it too.

The first time you made love was three months later in a penthouse overlooking the bay—neutral territory, paid for in untraceable Cobra gold. A summer thunderstorm raged outside, lightning strobing through floor-to-ceiling windows. The room smelled of rain and sandalwood incense he had lit himself.

He had removed the mask completely for the first time. You saw the man, not the legend: the faint lines at the corners of his eyes from years of squinting into rifle scopes, the small tattoo of the Arashikage tattoo on his arm, the way his hands trembled—just once—when he reached for you.

You stood barefoot on cool tatami, rain lashing the glass. He crossed the room like a shadow given form, fingers tracing the zipper of your tactical jacket as though it were sacred.

“Tell me to stop,” he whispered against your throat, voice raw. “And I will.”

You didn’t.

Clothes fell away in a slow dance of fabric and lightning. His skin was warm, scarred, alive. He laid you down on the wide bed as thunder rolled overhead, every movement reverent. When he entered you, it was with a single, shuddering breath that sounded like a prayer. You arched into him, nails digging into the muscle of his back, and for the first time in eighteen months you forgot the mission entirely. There was only the storm outside and the storm inside—his mouth on yours, his hips rolling in a rhythm as ancient as the clan he came from, your name—your real name—falling from his lips like a confession.

Afterward he held you while the rain slowed to a whisper, fingers tracing idle patterns on your spine.

“I have killed for less than the trust I have given you tonight,” he said quietly. “Do not make me regret it.”

You kissed the scar on his chest and lied beautifully. “Never.”

The memory dissolved as the transport doors opened at the secure G.I. Joe black site—an anonymous government building on the outskirts of the city, all concrete and steel and one-way glass. They marched him straight to interrogation room seven. You watched from the observation chamber, arms crossed tight over your chest, Duke beside you.

Tommy sat handcuffed to the table, white gi torn at the shoulder, blood drying on his temple. He stared directly at the mirror. Straight at you. Even though the glass was opaque from his side, he knew. His eyes—dark, ancient, unblinking—burned through the barrier like twin katanas.

He refused to speak to anyone else. Not Duke. Not the psych evaluator. Not the Cobra defector they brought in for leverage. For six straight hours he sat in silence until the interrogators were ready to tear their hair out.

Finally Duke sighed. “He wants you. Only you. Your call, Agent.”

You walked into the room alone. The door hissed shut behind you. The air was cold, sterile, smelling of disinfectant and old fear. Tommy lifted his head. The betrayal carved into his face was deeper than any scar the Arashikage had ever given him.

You leaned forward, keeping your posture textbook—shoulders square, eyes flat, the perfect interrogator. The red light on the wall camera blinked steadily; you knew Duke was on the other side of the glass watching. “Let’s make this quick, Arashikage. Cobra’s new weapons cache in the old subway tunnels beneath Roppongi—give me the access codes and the guard rotation. You do that and things get easier for you.”

He didn’t even blink at the question. His dark gaze stayed locked on yours like the glass between you didn’t exist. “You still wear the same perfume,” he said softly, voice carrying that same smoky gravel it always had in private. “I would know it in my sleep. Did you wear it tonight so I would remember what your skin smelled like when you lied in my arms?”

Your jaw tightened. You could feel Duke’s stare burning through the mirror. “Focus. The cache. Codes. Now.”

A ghost of a smile—bitter, devastated—touched his mouth. “You used to trace the scars on my chest with your tongue after we made love. You told me it felt like home. Was that in the mission brief too, Agent? Or did you improvise the part where you whispered you’d never leave me?”

Heat crawled up your neck. You forced it down, voice clipped and professional. “Cobra’s next strike on the Pacific fleet—Baroness’s timetable. Talk or we move to enhanced measures.”

He leaned as far forward as the cuffs allowed, voice dropping to the intimate register that used to melt you in Tokyo alleys. “I still taste you when I close my eyes. The way you said my name—like it was the only word that mattered. You’re sitting there pretending none of it happened while I’m chained to this table, and all I want to know is whether you were ever afraid I would love you too much to let you go.”

You stepped closer to the table, the sound of your boots loud enough to echo. “This is not a therapy session. You are an enemy combatant. Give me the fleet timetable or—”

“Or what?” he interrupted, eyes glistening but steady. “You’ll leave again? You already did. You left the moment you put these cuffs on me and handed me over to the joes. I just want the truth before they lock me away forever. Did you love me even for one second, or was every moan, every ‘I’m yours’ just excellent acting?”

Your throat closed. Behind the glass you knew they were recording every syllable. You swallowed hard, kept your face blank, and repeated the only safe words you had left: “The cache codes. That’s all I’m asking for.”

He sat back slowly, the chains rattling. The heartbreak on his face was so raw it hurt to look at, but his voice never wavered. “Then I have nothing to say to anyone but the woman I fell in love with. Until she admits she fell too, Cobra can burn for all I care.”

You stepped away from the table, your voice level. “It was a mission, Tommy. Deep cover. Get close to the Arashikage asset. End Cobra’s most dangerous operative. None of it was real.”

The words landed like bullets. You watched the impact travel across his features—jaw tightening, eyes narrowing, then the slow, terrible realization that every kiss, every night, every “I love you” had been spoken by a ghost.

You were good at lying. Years of training. Micro-expressions locked down. Heart rate steady. He searched your face the way a drowning man searches for shore and found nothing.

Before you turned to leave, he asked the question you had been dreading.

“Did you feel anything?” His voice was barely above a whisper. “Anything at all. Ever.”

You turned your head, stared at the wall. “No.”

The single word hung in the air like smoke after an explosion. You walked out without looking back.

That night the debrief dragged on for hours—after-action reports, psychological eval, commendations from General Hawk himself. You hadn’t slept in thirty-one hours. Your body felt like lead wrapped in barbed wire. When they finally released you, you stumbled down the dimly lit corridor to the temporary bunk room assigned to field agents: a ten-by-ten concrete box with a narrow cot, a locker, and a single fluorescent bulb.

You closed the door, leaned against it, and began shrugging out of your jacket. The fabric stuck to your skin with dried sweat and rain.

A presence.

You felt it before you heard it—the shift of air, the faint scent of steel and rain and the sandalwood he always carried. You spun.

Storm Shadow stood three feet away in the shadows beside the locker, sword already drawn, the edge resting feather-light against the side of your throat. How he had escaped maximum-security restraints, bypassed every camera and guard, and reached this room in under two hours was impossible. But he was Arashikage. Impossible was what they did.

You froze. “How did you—”

He ignored the question. His voice was low, dangerous, and trembling at the edges.

“Was it all a lie?”

You didn’t answer.

“Was it all a lie?” he repeated, stepping closer. The sword never wavered. “Did you lie when you said you loved me?”

“Yes,” you forced out. The word tasted like ash.

The mask—literal and figurative—slipped. His breath heaved. He moved until the blade kissed your skin and his chest nearly brushed yours.

“Liar.”

“I don’t love you,” you said, voice steady even as your pulse hammered.

“Liar!” he yelled this time. You flinched despite yourself.

His free hand rose, trembling, and brushed a tear you hadn’t realized had fallen. He was so close now you could see the faint tremor in his lower lip, the way his eyes glistened with something far more dangerous than rage.

“Tell me you love me,” he ordered, soft as a prayer.

“I don’t.”

The tears came faster. You couldn’t stop them.

“Tell me,” he whispered, forehead resting against yours, sword still at your throat. “Tell me you love me, and I will walk away forever if that is what you truly want. But say it and mean it.”

The dam broke.

“I love you,” you choked out, voice shattering. “God help me, Tommy, I love you. I fell in love with you somewhere between the first alley kiss and the night the thunder rolled over the bay. Every moment was real. Every touch. Every promise. I tried—I tried so hard not to—but I love you.”

For one heartbeat the world stopped.

Then he laughed—bitter, broken, the sound of a heart that had just been carved open and shown the wound. “I know,” he said simply.

The sword clattered to the floor. His hands seized your face with desperate gentleness, thumbs wiping at your tears, and he kissed you like a man drowning. It tasted of rain and blood and goodbye. His lips moved against yours with the same reverence as that first night in the penthouse, but now there was an edge of finality, of possession and loss braided together so tightly you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

When he pulled back, his eyes were wet.

“This isn’t over,” he whispered against your mouth. “I will find you again. And when the storm comes for you next time, it will be on my terms. Not Cobra’s. Not Joe’s. Mine.”

He released you. Turned. The door opened and closed without a sound.

He was gone.

You stood alone in the small room, sword lying at your feet like a broken promise. You could have hit the panic button. Could have screamed for security. Could have ended the greatest threat to G.I. Joe right then.

Instead you sank onto the cot, buried your face in your hands, and cried until there were no tears left—only the hollow echo of thunder in your chest and the knowledge that somewhere out in the night, the man you loved was already planning his revenge.

The storm had only just begun.