#coldcomfort

“I didn’t.”

“Shao Kahn! I challenge Scorpion, the murderer of my brother. You will bring him before me!” A cyclone of fury and fire burst from the ground at Quan-Chi’s demand, delivering what he had sought. But he would not be satisfied until the wraith’s death at his chilled hand. 

“What is this? You are not Sub-Zero!” 

“I am his family and his clan. I fight for his honor.”

“He had no honor, and you will die as he did!”

In a sea of fire and ice, the two warriors met over the cheers of the masses.

“It is a long tale. One of misunderstandings, manipulations, and the decision of two men to put a hatred old and new to rest. It begins with Kombat, and shall end with it if the fates will spare a kind glance upon old souls.” And so his version of events begins, weaving past and present with liquid ease. The flow of events was not unlike the flow of water, cold and clear in the stream of consciousness established by his recollections. Kuai Liang was well aware that he was not the storyteller that his husband was, but he made due with the stories of scars long gone and carved anew. The child will know their story, for their love and communion is no secret, and that is what matters. 

“Sub-Zero, thank you for giving me some of your time.” If the Lin Kuei had been as secretive as the Grandmaster suggested they had once been, this was a unique opportunity. Ryu jotted down ‘no known ex members’ before flushing under Kuai Liang’s curiousity.

“It is I who is blessed to be with you, Hanzo.” The quiet declaration comes in the dead of night, long after they have come together and lain in the aftermath of  It was Scorpion who set his cold heart ablaze, a welcome warmth in a lifetime of ice and the whipping winds. The former wraith’s love moved him across the realms and lifetimes lived with the  thread that was their joining. It brought the cold haze from his eyes in the shadows, revealing a gaze that was as dark as it was intense, filled with a love undying. 

Sinew begins to wrap around the bone and then muscle around that until he is once more whole.

He mourns not for the state of the floors, for what has appeared before him is the subject of his letters, the igniter of his passions, what scorched the earth and made a home wherever he went. His rival had returned, and with him the warmth installed in the Grandmaster’s heart. There was no sound more welcome to his ears than that of the fierce screams of a man reborn in flame, nor was there a notion more welcome than the idea that death’s permanence could not hope to take hold of this union. 

Sub-Zero folds the comforter back and climbs from the bed, taking the man known to his enemies as Scorpion, his students as Grandmaster, and to him as Hanzo by the wrist.

"Warm... It was warm." An agreement between two Grandmasters, that is how it began. Scorpion had come to Arctika for his scheduled tea with Sub-Zero and proposed an arrangement, the bonding of their clans through a season in one another’s terrain. 

“Pain and hardship build strength of character—when the body suffers, the mind must harden.” Hanzo said, flinty eyes sparked with the embers of something utterly serious in this declaration, he did not joke about such things. It had been one moment of many in which Kuai Liang found himself kindred to the other man, where they reached into one another’s minds as they would the heart of an enemy and pulled from one another these deeply held truths to vocalize. The image then shifted to the ceremony of tea, the utterance of ghost stories as the roaring winds of Arctika carried an implication ancient through its valleys, and finally the culmination of all things: Kombat. Bloodsport, the truest expression of a man’s self, they rose from the wares and slipped into the icy clearing, his mouth forming around a single syllable, a call to action.

“Come.” How beautiful Hanzo looked when the kunai went for his throat and the howl reminiscent of a wraith’s power cut the air with the same prowess as the man behind it. It tempted him, smashed through the kryomancer at the same height and intensity as Scorpion’s fist to his face, his fists to Scorpion’s. Blood mingled with blood in the meeting of their lips, and much, much more to meet on that day.

“That is all you get. Begone.”

The cryomancer laid a patch of ice down and pushed himself onto it with the swiftness of a man well trained in the art. He stopped mere inches from the Shirai Ryu’s former Grandmaster, stepping forth in one long stride. 

“I am here.” One arm slid around Scorpion’s waist, the other reaching under the man’s chin and tilting it upward.

 An impish smile touched those lips, all the way up to his cold eyes.