#bitestail

        The witcher stepped into the river, the water deeper than it looked. Cool, heavy, reaching just to his waist. It bit pleasantly at sore muscles & pulled the heat out of them. A low sigh slipped past scarred lips as he scooped up a handful of water, splashing it across his chest. It carried the blood away in thin streams, dried patches breaking apart while newer cuts bled clean again. He’d been hunting earlier — brought down a boar easy enough — but it was never tidy work. Still, the river didn’t care.... It took the mess like it always did.

       Naoto returned to Arys’s shop when he alleged that he had a serious matter requiring Naoto’s attention. Of course, Naoto being the good friend and customer that she is, heeded it with no hesitation - dropping all matters to show up at his door. She composes herself, prepared to hear any kind of news before entering the shop. Arys waves her over to the counter.

     “I heard you needed me. Is something wr-” 

     Arys holds up the holster. 

     Naoto blinks a few times before the surprised expression on her face relaxes into a smile. “Arys…” She takes the holster, tracing the flowers in the leatherwork with her fingers. They’re blue flowers - her favorite color. She plays with the pouch, testing the magnet. It’s nice and sturdy, just as he promised. She undoes her present holster - a plain brown, leather one to replace it with Arys’s latest handiwork. It fits like a glove. 

     She slips her sheathed blade into place. Holds Inugami well, too. She twirls around, as if testing to see if the blade would remain steady. It does.

     This makes her giddy.

PROMPTS FOR CATCHING UP AND CHECKING IN || @bitestail || accepting

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The word reaches him three days later, in the way all words reach Hanzo Hasashi - not through speech, but through the space between things. Through the particular quality of silence Arys wears when he thinks he is unobserved. Through the way youth sometimes opens its mouth on something true before wisdom teaches it the cost of honesty.

You don't have to handle all of this by yourself, you know.

Hanzo is still. The fire between them is low, a murmur of a thing, and the mercenary camp is ash and cold iron two valleys behind them, the men who set traps for creatures they called currency now arranged in their own kind of stillness.

He had been efficient about it. He is always efficient about the things that matter most, because efficiency is what remains when feeling becomes a liability. He had not let himself feel anything in that camp. He had let himself be the instrument only. The arrow. The blade. The geometry of retrieval.

He knows Arys is right.

He knows this the way he knows the angle of the sun through treeline, the way he knows the precise weight of a drawn bow in his hands - not as revelation, but as fact long-catalogued, filed, and never once acted upon. Knowing and doing have always been different countries for him. He was born in one and has lived his entire life refusing to cross into the other.

What Hanzo does not say - what lives in the vault of him like smoke behind locked stone - is this:

That he has lost every single thing he has ever permitted himself to keep. That love, in his experience, is not a shelter but a taxonomy of future grief, and he has already filled that catalogue to its margins. A brother. A self. Years upon years of a life that was his in name only, wielded by other hands toward other ends. He has stood at so many graves, real and metaphorical, and each time he thought: I should not have let this matter. This is what happens when you let things matter. And each time, the lesson failed to take, because something in him - unreasonable, animal, surviving - kept choosing to matter anyway.

Arys matters.

This is the terror of it. Not a terror Hanzo would name aloud, not with a throat built from scar tissue and silence, but a terror that was present in every measured pull of that blade from silver-poisoned flesh, in every second the cauterizing iron held steady through the sound of the boy's pain, in the three days of tracking that followed with a fury he dressed as focus, called strategy, refused to call what it actually was - which was this will not happen again, I will burn down every mechanism by which this happens again, I will leave nothing standing that could reach him.

To share the weight of this, he would have to name it.

To name it, he would have to open the room he does not visit.

In that room: Kuai Liang. In that room: every version of Hanzo Hasashi that trusted the world to hold what he handed it, and watched the world drop it anyway. In that room: a fire that burned in both directions - outward and inward both - and left him standing in the ash, more alone than the dead, because the dead at least do not have to keep choosing how to survive their own grief.

He has not shown Arys this room.

He will not show Arys this room.

His jaw sets. His eyes remain on the fire. When he finally speaks, his voice is what it always is - stone, years, the particular timbre of a man who learned very early that control was the only architecture that did not collapse - but beneath it, if one listened for it, if one had spent enough time in proximity to what Hanzo Hasashi actually is beneath the monument of what he presents: the faintest, briefest fracture. Like a fault line seen from altitude. There and then gone.

"I know," he says.

Two words. The whole of him folded inside them, unreachable.

The fire speaks for a moment. The forest breathes. His eyes do not leave the flame, and the flame does not give anything away, and Hanzo sits with the weight he will not distribute, the grief he will not name, the boy across the fire who is alive - alive - which is, in the end, the only proof he has that this time, just this once, the world held what he handed it.

He does not say: I do not know how to do it differently. He does not say: I am afraid of what happens when I stop being the one who handles it. He does not say: you are still here and I will take that apart with my bare hands before I let that change.

He says nothing more. His thumb moves once against the heel of his palm, private, invisible - the same motion as before, muscle memory of a comfort he cannot give outward, turned inward instead. And then he reaches forward and feeds the fire one more piece of wood, and the warmth between them grows, and this is the only language he has ever spoken without flaw.

--- ↪ prompt. ( nonverbal. )

oh shit -- yoru felt like his life flashed before his eyes for a second there. within the bustling array of lively customers and staff alike coming and going within the cafe, yoru hardly has a moment to slow down and catch his breath. it's why when he rounds a corner, he doesn't register arys standing right there until he's already bumped into him, tray of food tipping over and threatening to fall as he feels himself slip. he makes a small noise in surprise, and it's stifled when he feels arys hand wrap around his waist to quickly help him back upright, food secure and no longer on the verge of slipping off. with a startled gaze and racing heartbeat, he tries to steady his breathing with his hand resting against his chest.

" fuck, you startled me .... sorry, i didn't see you for a second. " he readjusts himself, looking over at the tray of food he was carrying and sees that it was still unharmed. briefly, he looks to arys with an appreciative smile until he grows aware of the weight settled against his waist. " but, uh .... can't really work properly if you're holding me like this. "

*cough* arys also has big naturals maybe they can..smoosh them together....

BINGO ( accepting ) — @bitestail

He's squinting — has been ever since the paper was handed over. It's like looking at some over marked quiz. Except there aren't any errors outlined in red, just an abundance of stars.

It's .... well, blinding. Kind of intimidating too, if he's being completely honest.

The lollipop stick angles upwards as he skims the BINGO card again. Nope, still seeing everything but one choice marked. And speaking of which ...

Random Inbox Shenanigans || @bitestail || always accepting!

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The forest does not warn before it breaks something open. It is the absence that reaches Hanzo first - that particular silence which is not silence at all but the held breath of every living thing going still at once. He has walked these patrol routes long enough to know the language of the woods at night; the rhythm of it, the grammar of owl-call and wind-drag through pine.

He knows, intimately, the way darkness breathes when it is undisturbed. The way it settles into itself. The way it keeps its own counsel.

This is not that.

His feet stop before his mind issues the command. It is an old instinct, older than his training, older almost than memory - the body's private intelligence, the part of him that survived things the mind could not fully hold. Scars carry their own nervous system. His do. And they are screaming.

The lantern at his belt gutters though there is no wind. Hanzo's hand moves, without his permission, to the hilt at his side. His breathing does not change. It never changes. He learned, at great and terrible cost, to keep it even - to deny his body the small luxury of visible fear - because there was a time when he allowed himself to feel the full velocity of panic, and what followed that time was something he has spent every year since trying to outrun.

He does not outrun it now. He simply holds it. Sets it behind his teeth and keeps it there.

His eyes sweep the treeline in a single practiced arc. Every shadow catalogued. Every variance in the dark accounted for. He has stood in burning courtyards. He has identified the moment a brother becomes a weapon. He has learned, in ways that rewrote him entirely, that the thing which destroys you rarely announces itself. It is almost always the thing you turned your back on. The silence before the blade. The stillness before the -

There.

A shape, stumbling. Lurching between the trees like something that has forgotten the basic negotiation between will and body. A trail dark and wet against the earth, threading back into the forest's throat like a vein cut open, like a sentence with no ending.

Hanzo's chest does something it is not supposed to do - seizes, briefly, with a recognition that is not yet rational, that lives somewhere below thought. He has seen trails like this before. He has followed trails like this before, lantern in hand, heart hammering against the cage of his discipline, and arrived too late, and stood over what was left, and carried the weight of that arrival ever since.

He moves. Not running - there is no panic in the geometry of him, he will not allow it - but the ground disappears beneath him with the terrible efficiency of a man who has learned that hesitation is its own form of violence. Every sense sharpened to a point. The back of his neck. The periphery. He is aware, simultaneously, of every direction the darkness might open from, every angle an ambush might favor. He cannot help it. He has tried. The vigilance is not a choice anymore, if it ever was - it is structural, load-bearing, woven into the way he occupies space. He does not move through a room, or a forest, or a life without already knowing where the exits are. Without already having imagined the worst.

He is already imagining it now.

The lantern throws its amber teeth across the undergrowth, and he sees him.

Arys.

The name does not leave his lips. Not yet. It collapses inward instead, a structure folding on itself, and for one terrible fraction of a second - one splinter of time he will never speak of - the image before him superimposes over older images, bloodier ones, images that live behind his eyes like permanent residents. He blinks them back. Files them back behind the door where they belong. The iron trap. The arrow's broken shaft rising from the boy's back like a terrible flag planted in conquered territory, the blood, the blood, the blood threading between the roots and the dirt and the dark —

He is at his side before the next breath escapes him.

Something in Hanzo Hasashi has gone absolutely, cathedral-quiet. Not calm - he knows the difference, has spent long enough performing one to understand it is not the other. This is the stillness of a man holding something massive and ragged at arm's length through sheer force of trained will. His hands - scarred, certain, capable of breaking and of building - find Arys with a gentleness that costs him something.

One arm catches him before he can claw himself further into the earth. The other cups the back of his skull with a care that is almost unconscious, almost muscle memory, the gesture of a man who once had something to protect and lost it, and has never fully stopped reaching.

"I am here."

His voice, when it arrives, is not soft. It does not comfort in the way of easy things. It is low - ground-deep, carrying the sediment of a man who has identified too many bodies, who knows exactly how quickly the living become the past tense, who has stood in the specific silence that follows catastrophe and learned, the hardest possible way, to refuse it. It is a voice that says not tonight without the words. It is a voice that has argued with death before and occasionally won.

"I have you." A pause. Assessing. The arrow's angle. The trap's iron bite. The rate of blood. All of it received and calculated behind eyes that give nothing away. His jaw tightens - one brief, private betrayal - then sets again. "Be still."

His hand finds the wound beside the shaft and presses. Steady. Steady. Holding the rupture closed by sheer insistence, the way he has learned to hold so many ruptures - his own among them. The forest crowds close around them, breathing. Somewhere behind them, something moves in the undergrowth and Hanzo's eyes snap to it immediately, sharply, tracking - and then release. An animal. Nothing more.

He exhales, once, through his nose.

Returns his full attention to the boy beneath his hands.

"You are going to breathe," he says, and it is a command dressed in something that is almost - not quite, but almost - tenderness. The voice of a man who does not often permit himself the vulnerability of caring and has, despite everything, failed spectacularly at not caring about this one. "Slowly. Follow my breath."

He breathes. Deliberately. Demonstrating.

"I will not let you fall."

And the forest - the same forest that once swallowed Arys whole, the same darkness that has taken so many things from so many people -goes very, very quiet around them, as though it too understands that the man kneeling in its dirt has already lost enough, has already stood over enough graves, has already arrived too late enough times that the universe, in whatever dim conscience it possesses, understands it owes him this.

Not this one.

【 ♡ 】 ― Xenia is wide-eyed. Within his workshop was a large array of baking tools that seem revolutionary, and the baker could not help but to prance around the area and gawk at every discovery she makes. From unique-looking whisks to an amazingly efficient rolling pin, she picks one up after the other... stuffing them into her arms at the plans of purchasing them.

However, an item catches her eyes from across the room. It looks like a container of some sort, or perhaps... a baking mould. She pulls it out from the pile and waves it excitedly at Arys, wondering if there is anything different about this one.

❝ Whoa... I've never seen anything like this before! H-How exactly does it work, Mr. Blacksmith? ❞

starter for @bitestail. 🩶