#rcqviems

“I will lock you in the trunk of your own car and help your loved ones hang up missing posters Kennedy.”

@rcqviems sent 🪓

it wasn’t hard for krauser to snap bones. other people’s, that is. the man underneath him was writhing, crying out in pain as krauser laughed, his leg now shattered.

it was so easy to toy with humans now, so small, fragile, weak. they were like insects to him, minuscule compared to his power. his knife slid like butter through flesh and bone, cutting off anymore struggling.

reveling in the kill, he stands over the body until his head whips to the side. someone else is here, he can sense their presence. it's like a homing beacon, their heat. predator instincts still in overdrive he turns and is met with a familiar face.

@rcqviems gets a starter.

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The briefing room smells of old war. Of cleaned steel and unspoken burial rites.

Hanzo Hasashi does not enter a room so much as arrive in it - the distinction matters, the way weather matters, the way the first crack in ice before a body falls through matters. He is already standing when Leon Kennedy looks up, as though he materialized from the cold geometry of the shadows behind the fluorescent hum, as though he has always been there, patient as a held breath.

He is not in the armor tonight. He is in tactical black, subdued and severe, silver threading his pulled-back hair like seams of ore through dark stone. The clan markings are hidden beneath a commander's collar. But nothing about him reads as ordinary. Nothing about him reads as safe. He carries stillness the way a drawn blade carries stillness - taut, purposeful, a quietude that is not peace but the architecture of restrained force.

His eyes find Leon's face and stay there. Not a threat. An accounting. The slow, thorough reading of a man who has learned to measure others in seconds because seconds are all the living ever have.

He lets the silence hold between them a moment longer than courtesy allows. This is not rudeness. This is appraisal. He has buried too many ghosts who went into battle beside strangers wearing pleasant faces, and he will not do so again without first knowing the weight of the man across from him.

"You come with a name I have been given," he says at last, and his voice is low and deliberate, each word placed like a step across uncertain terrain, "and a record that precedes you like smoke before flame."

He sets a single folder on the table between them. Doesn't open it. The gesture says: I have read you already. I do not need the paper.

"I am Hanzo Hasashi." Not Commander. Not rank, not title, not the name the fire gave him in the Netherrealm - not yet. Here he is the man before the myth, the flesh before the legend, and he offers the lesser name deliberately, a stone laid at the threshold. We begin as men. We will see what we become.

"What we are hunting does not care which banner we carry into its territory." His jaw tightens once, almost imperceptibly - a hairline fracture of something older than this mission, older than this room, pressing against the composure he wears like a second skin. "What we are hunting has fed on the careless. On the proud. On those who believed their preparation was sufficient."

He moves to the tactical display. His hands, when they work the interface, are unhurried but precise - no wasted motion, the hands of a man for whom efficiency is a form of respect for the dead.

"I do not require you to trust me," he says, and there is no wound in it, no plea dressed as indifference. It is simply true, the way gravity is true. "I require you to function. I require you to speak when you see what I do not, and to act when action is the only language left."

He turns then, and the light catches the old scar at his throat, the constellation of harder histories written in his skin, and his eyes hold the particular quality of a man who has looked into the source of darkness and returned - not unchanged, not unbroken exactly, but reforged, the fractures filled with something harder than the original.

"Tell me what you know," he says. "Then tell me what you suspect. The truth that fits between those two things - that is where we will find our beginning." ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

The sound that his body makes as it collides against the hard surface seems to convey far more of his discomfort than any sound he makes. The most that comes out, between him trying to draw a knife and feeling the other man grab at his wrist to prevent it, is a low hiss of annoyance.

He glares from behind the red lenses that cover his eyes. Through gritted teeth, he cannot speak. But the frustration is there. Felt when he uses his other arm and starts to push against Leon's chest. Trying to shove him away as fast as possible.

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

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| Hanzo receives the words the way a blade receives a whetstone - not with flinching, but with the slow, deliberate surrender of something already hard being made sharper.

He does not answer immediately.

He stands at the window of the command post the way he has stood at the edge of every precipice his many lives have shown him - the lip of the Netherrealm, the threshold of his burned home, the border between the man he was and the wreckage that wore his face after. Outside, the city moves. Indifferent. Alive. He watches it the way only someone who has lost a world can watch one still turning, still breathing, still full of people who do not know how close they stand to the dark.

Then he speaks.

He has been the other thing.

This is what Hanzo Hasashi knows that he will not say plainly, because plain words are not sufficient containers for this particular grief. He has been the creature that sealed itself inside its own wound and called the sealing strength. He has worn fury like armor forged from everyone he loved who died - hammered it across his chest, bolted it over the place where softness used to live - and he has walked through fire and called himself whole. He was not whole. He was a scar that had forgotten the skin it came from.

Scorpion - and even now the name sits differently in his chest, heavier and rawer than his rank, than his title, than the gold-thread mantle of the Grandmaster - Scorpion accepted no hand. Scorpion walked the path that grief demands when grief is permitted to become god, and that path goes down, always down, spiraling through righteous vengeance into something that no longer required justification, only fuel. He remembers the cold of it. The terrible, specific cold of a man who has convinced himself that needing nothing is the same as being above loss.

He was not above loss. He had simply made himself into loss. Made himself into it, worn it like skin, until there was no seam between Hanzo and the consuming dark he carried.

His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. Outside the window, a soldier crosses the courtyard with a hand pressed to another soldier's shoulder - steadying, steadying - and Hanzo watches this the way a man dying of thirst watches rain fall somewhere he cannot reach.

Except he can reach it now. Except that is the entire point.

Leon S. Kennedy has said a true thing.

He has said it plainly, the way men who have walked through their own particular hells tend to say true things - without ceremony, without the elaborate scaffolding of philosophy, just the blunt and gleaming fact of it laid out like a weapon offered hilt-first. If we get to the point where we don't help each other anymore, that's when we stop being human. Simple. Devastating. The kind of sentence that only sounds simple because the man saying it has already paid the price for understanding it.

Hanzo turns from the window.

He faces the other man - this improbable, stubborn, impossible-to-kill soldier with his grief worn differently, worn outward, worn in a way Hanzo spent a lifetime refusing to do - and what passes across his face is not gratitude exactly, and not quite recognition, though it is made of both. It is something older. Something that lives in the part of him that remembers burning and still chose, in this life, in this reincarnation with its strange merciful distance from what he was, to build something instead of raze.

He does not embrace the moment. He is not built for easy softness. But he does not deflect it either - does not fold it away into compartment and command and the clean, manageable geometry of duty.

What Hanzo Hasashi says is this:

"I know."

Two syllables. But the way he says them carries the full architecture of a man who learned this truth the most catastrophic way a truth can be learned - in the aftermath. In the bone-deep recognition that the seclusion he wore as dignity was loneliness in a general's uniform. That wrath unwitnessed is not power but erosion. That a man who accepts no companion is not undefeatable - he is simply alone when he falls, which is a different and quieter and somehow crueler kind of defeat.

"I know," he says, and beneath it, though he speaks no further, there is the full weight of what he knows: the years of burning, of walking the Netherrealm with nothing to hold but hatred, of refusing every offered hand until the refusing became the only reflex he had left. There is the memory of what it cost - not abstractly, not philosophically - but specifically, bodily, in the particular currency of everyone he might have let stand beside him and did not. In the silence where his brother might have spoken, if he had allowed a brother to remain.

Hanzo Hasashi is Scorpion and he is Grandmaster and he is commander of men who run toward the dark on his word, which means he understands - has earned the understanding through failure so total it rewrote the landscape of him - that the moment he stops being answerable to another human being is the moment he becomes something that only resembles what he once was.

A ghost wearing a warrior's face. A flame that has consumed everything it was meant to protect. He will not be that again.

So when Leon Kennedy says we help each other - when this man, this ravaged and faithful and somehow-still-standing man, extends the principle like it is simple, like it is obvious - Hanzo receives it without armor. Receives it with the only kind of courage that was ever actually hard for him: the courage of remaining present. Of letting the words land in the place where they are true and painful and necessary instead of deflecting them outward into the cleaner air of tactical abstraction.

He holds the other man's gaze.

His hands are very still, the way the hands of dangerous men are still when they are choosing not to be dangerous.

This, the stillness says. This is the thing I died inside once for refusing.

I remember.