First impressions meme: the verdict is mysterious and not bad looking.
Miharu is not one to judge for looks, nor assess someone through their physicality, but she is drawn to the way Hanzo is serious, which is the first impression he makes on her. She has seen various men - those with foolish smiles, those with confidence that stand on fragile egos. Then there is Hanzo Hasashi. He is the man she does not swerve from easily, because she recognizes that his seriousness - the word is insufficient, she finds later, and replaces the descriptive to committed and patient - is what sets him apart and she refuses to admit it that she is impressed by the fact that he is truly different from others; and she is a woman swerves from men who peacock over her, fawn over her because she knows she is beautiful, but has not earned her trust nor her friendship.
Her physical attraction to him is culmination of moments that draw her in towards him, towards the magnetic pull of his looks, which has never been the primary reason she stays in his orbit but merely a factor and she will not deny that he is, although there is permanent exhaustion in his face, that he is undeniably, a good-looking man.
Of course, there is the other kind of physicality; in which Miharu has secretly already sized him up - the way his body moves in spaces with economical deliberateness, with no efforts wasted and the way his frame easily towers over hers, is sufficient enough to make her want to appear flustered, to appear small, which is a thing that happens when she realizes he is standing too close, too near to her and somehow she does not mind that she could feel the warmth of his body and does not mind that she could smell him - intoxicating. His larger frame tells her he is capable - which is honed through years and years of experience.
How did you think they ended up with a daughter?
FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Going by looks alone, what are your muse’s first thoughts about mine before meeting them || @vulpuslunae || accepting
💥|| Hanzo does not notice her, not at first.
He is not a man who notices easily anymore - not since the grief scraped him hollow, not since he learned that noticing things too keenly, loving them too completely, is its own form of ruin. He passes through the infirmary the way he passes through every room now: with the efficiency of a man who has catalogued exits before he has catalogued faces, who measures a space for threat before he measures it for warmth.
She is simply part of the architecture to him. A white coat. A clipboard. A voice that does not fawn.
That last thing catches him, though he does not register it catching him. Not yet.
The other physicians speak to him the way people speak to monuments - carefully, with reverence that is indistinguishable from distance, asking only what the monument expects to be asked. How are you sleeping, Commander? Any pain in the shoulder? Any recurring symptoms? They are reading from the script that a man like him invites simply by existing in a certain way. He answers the way a monument answers: precisely, economically, without invitation.
She does not read from the script.
He cannot name when it changes - it does not change in a single moment but in the accumulation of them, the way a tide does not announce itself but simply arrives.
He sits across from her in the small room that smells of antiseptic and paper, and she is reviewing something in the light and she asks him, without looking up, whether the fire is actually intact the way he wrote, or whether he wrote it because a man in his position cannot afford to write anything else.
The silence that follows is the longest he has permitted himself in months.
He does not answer immediately. This, too, she does not rush. She simply waits - not with the weighted patience of someone holding breath, but with the easy, unhurried patience of someone who already understands that real answers take longer than the rehearsed ones, and she is willing to remain in the room with him while he finds his way toward one.
It is, he realizes slowly, unbearably, the most human he has been made to feel since the letter he burned.
He watches her, now, when he returns for the follow-up assessments. He tells himself it is a commander's habit - the cataloguing of variables, the observation of patterns - but the honesty he has kept buried beneath mission reports stirs uncomfortably and insists it is something else entirely. He watches the way she moves between workstations with the same economical deliberateness he recognizes in himself, though in her it carries none of the martial hardness his own movement has accumulated. Hers is the economy of someone who has learned to be useful in small spaces, precise in the service of something fragile.
He is not a man who is easily moved by beauty.
He has known beautiful women the way he has known beautiful landscapes - with appreciation that does not become attachment, cannot afford to become attachment.
But there is something specific about the way she stands in light, the way her attention settles on whatever is before her without theatre or performance, that begins to unsettle something in the locked geometry of his chest.
He does not name what it is. He files it where he files everything that cannot be immediately acted upon.
The warming is not dramatic. It does not announce itself with the grandeur grief announced itself, with the velocity loss arrived. It is quieter than that - quieter, and therefore somehow more dangerous to a man who has built his survival on identifying threats before they close the distance.
It is in the moment she hands him water without being asked, because she noticed he had not had any in the hour they had spoken, and she does not call attention to the gesture as though it is a kindness that requires acknowledgment. It is in the moment she disagrees with something he says about his own psychological state - not with the careful diplomatic hedging of someone managing a difficult subject, but with the frank, unadorned certainty of someone who simply does not believe him and sees no reason to pretend otherwise.
He is not accustomed to being doubted.
He finds, to his deep private bewilderment, that he does not resent it.
She is not trying to reach him. That is the thing he understands eventually, sitting in the quiet of his quarters with the city humming beyond the glass. She is not performing patience, not accumulating small strategic kindnesses with any architecture of intent. She is simply present. She simply sees him - not the commander, not the mission record, not the convenient myth of the fire is intact - but the man who is raw at the knuckles and still shows up.
He does not know what to do with being seen. He is profoundly, dangerously unequipped for it.
But in the space of her waiting, in the undemanding steadiness of her attention, something in him ceases - just barely, just fractionally - to brace.
He does not call it anything yet. He is not ready to call it anything.
But he comes back. He keeps coming back. And each time, the distance between his architecture and the warmth of her unhurried presence grows, by the smallest and most irrevocable of margins, shorter. 💥||