#swirling at the intersection of grief and peace and joy

[bones-n-bookles]

There's a Kit shaped impression on my chest, and a Torch shaped slot in my life

[sasorikigai]

A Beautiful & Baneful Contradiction ||                       A Hanzo Hasashi & Kuai Liang story (feat. Scorpion). [ Part 2 ]

Hanzo finds himself at the death’s door again, as a brick of heavy exhaustion rests heavy in his stomach and scraping off the scorched and weakened walls of his lungs as he struggles further and further with each breath drawn with ragged finality and denouement, his viewfinder dwindling from the blue of Kuai Liang’s concerned sapphire gaze into black. He does not want to leave it, but his back is permanent to it. The world collides to him in a mortifying color, echoing off the stone walls of the training grounds like the requiem as his shallow, faint breathing sharpens and spikes as his face-down form jerks upward and writhes visibly and violently. The same burning desire that once kept him above the tormenting whirl of engulfing hellfire caves in, as the pull of its tide threatens to drown him whole. 

“I have defeated you once, I will have no qualms of silencing your voice for eternity!” Lips painted ruby red, eyes wide and glistening like blade, Hanzo feels his bones straining under the weight of all the lives he wasn’t living as the Fire Demon. 

“You are pathetic and weak because you do not admit the truth of your voice, you are Scorpion, the agent of Chaos, the conduit that will bring the realm to its knees.” The sharp edges of his milky glower heightens with all the sharp edges of his own flames dripping like splintering razor blades. 

Despite all the dismay, despite the fact that no one else attracted such vituperation from the menacing spectre that expels utterly bewildering, unchoreographed frenzy of colors, Hanzo’s unbreakable battle stance breaks into the velocity of motion; as a belligerent torrent of tightened fists split the air with cleansing fire, barraging against Scorpion’s achen visage, as the machinery of his thoughts churn, and parry the thrusted wrath. Hanzo’s blood gallops through his ventricles, as unsheathed blade hones with the equal measure of his own intensity and defiance, burning through the atmosphere. 

“I will split your skull in half once again and make sure you won’t ever devour through my darkness ever again.” beneath the suffocating air of silence, the unending quiet stretches thin between them as harrowing shudder of their flames’ breaths draw blood; dark blots and stains marking out the recollections of their previous fight. The earth below them will saturate, run black with their blood. For blood calls for blood, and such hue exemplifies Hanzo’s passion and obstinance as Scorpion’s initial barrage threatens to strip his flesh, as the venomous tongue of his fingers and the fluidity of the Scorpion’s numerous sting open his flesh and dig into the slatted impression of his ribcage. 

“Such words for an ingrate weakling that don’t deserve the abundance of growing strength of hellfire. Truth be told, ever since I took over your psyche, I always have wondered what would be the point to abandon your existentiality, compared to the wavering, unsure powerlessness that you wear as a human form.”

In his own stripping of flesh, Hanzo experiences the harsh, yet strange comfort of unfamiliar sensation shifting and slipping over his body. The shackling clutch of the hellspawn may bind his middle and arms, rendering him incapable as bound bones and muscles stain with sanguine red, and he finds himself inciting screams like mantras, as if calling to his internal power and to his spirit, to the soul inherent within. 

He remains covered in sin, a wreak of disappointment that dwells within. Kuai Liang witnesses all the brokenness within Hanzo; battered and bare, tides shifting, time ticking, mud slinging, tongues flapping, eyelids rolling towards the back of his head..... It’s the inevitable Dance of Death; fire starting, sparkling, extinguishable embers licking over the vulnerable mortality of a man. As once-peaceful and steadily balanced mind of Hanzo Hasashi caving in beneath the excess of cacophony pandemonium and grim oblivion, Sub-Zero turns his power inward, as he recalls a particular chaos he’d known all his life and had been etched upon the backbone of his entirety. Death, horror, gloom, doom, destruction and famine - it’s him, helplessly staring, from outwards and within, as Tundra, who had turned hopelessness to opportunity, misery to hope, bane and unholy to effulgent light, and abrupt ends to new beginning. 

___

The bile that fester just below his waist erupts to his throat, as if Kuai Liang had been going through the excruciating transformation of being resurrected from a lifeless, abandoned body to the undead cryomancer that would serve the Netherrealm’s pain and suffering. The dryness of death will not leave his throat for the entire preceding, as such reflection exhibited from Hanzo’s agonized countenance would further cripple him. The shame, the finality and finiteness of death, the one’s life perished beneath the decisiveness of his action famines his already thawed heart and leaves it to become a thick, liquid gloop. If only his lover could see love and compassion as a solution for the majority of the humanity problems, their shared worlds - Hanzo Hasashi’s world - would already be a much better place to live. 

It’s the impervious world Kuai Liang wants to be a permanent part of, yet, such conquering might of their respective trauma and hardships would decimate them anew and they will be washed out with or without grace. Either way, they will come out of the wash, and once again, vibrant and decisive survivability would be an inevitability. As they have grown further with the verses of love through hardships, all the combined grief and joy and delirium and the gray areas where they intersect. While it may be so very difficult to capture the whole mechanism as it is, Kuai Liang appreciates this joy and love, this coexistence which cannot be expressed, just as it would be extremely difficult to describe the human condition which they both become the culprits to suffer the most beneath the warped restrictions and resistance. 

Kuai wonders if his tracing of his lover’s vertebrae would instill and claim Hanzo; that even when plunged in confines of solitary loneliness, The life is full of escapes. For even the labyrinthine maze too dark and riddled with hopelessness could be salvaged, even when it becomes too far away and distant from his own heart, he knows that the Shirai Ryu Grandmaster’s heart doesn’t belong in such a dark place. He won’t become the sand in the ocean; which can no longer separate oneself from the violent waves, but inevitably, he will get to kiss the lavender skies as his face saturates warm against the mellifluous tune of the wind, as his heart fills with gentle waters. 

Even when the sternest and the most savage natural images of the desolate and terrible plunges him to his own labyrinth which Kuai Liang struggled to free himself from would overcome even the heart becoming a heartache. “No macabre streaks, nor unremitting, splintering pain will cause you to submit in death, Hanzo, I have an absolute faith that you will endure and rise.” 

Etched worry and concern amplifies when unconscious Hanzo begins to hack drops of blood, as his body would burn as if it would completely disintegrate beneath the smoldering funeral pyre - a dance macabre without end - as skin becomes slick with sweat and saturate with matted ash. Kuai Liang could feel Hanzo’s body pushing beyond the limits of what his physical body can take, against the voracious hunger of spirits in such twisted truth... and he finds his own profile melting into the presence of comforting shadows of Hanzo’s abdomen, as he feels something stir amidst the writhing tremble of aureate flesh. 

As if his words had been a lifesaving rope cast in the unknown ocean, reaching his lover, through the burning sparks in the night. 

____

Hanzo remains damaged, stuck in this unknown realm that mimics the landscape of his ravaged psyche. He’s not whole, but not broken quite yet; he’s been sealed and ripped apart so many times that he’d lost count. His heart cries out in every painful beat, and feels the scorching tendrils of maggots feeding off of his tender flesh. His life is once again brought up to its existence, as his steady breath witnesses the doppelgänger of Scorpion’s persona; lifeless, ashen face filled with impressions of wrath and revenge, the once vivacious, absorbing eyes tainted with obfuscated fog of swirling tendrils of scorching hellfire as he readies the fatal blow. The ever sycophant of chaos and death and all things related to nihilistic view of the world, as all that remain would be dirt and ash and bone fragments of the dead, pulverized to nothing.