#coldcomfort

[lazilyweepingartisan]

Thank you @skitzofreak for wonderful rebelcapitan stories. Rogue One made me fall for the fandom and I was so lucky I read this exact work after watching the movie.

[sxvethelastdance]

when Scorpion vowed to be your guardian, you probably had no idea. how did you go from that to married?

“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. 

“We never compromised our morals, our values for the sake of this union. We did not need to. Hanzo, he understands me. And I him. We did not always, but when we did... We became better men. Men who love ferociously and fight for that love with all that they are and more. Find that, and you will one day have a story of your own to tell.”

[daughterofnero]

continued from |X| @sxvethelastdance

“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.

“Yeah, uh, my mom’s old family were magic users of the uh, not exactly ethical variety. Lots of necromancy, references to something called a Netherrealm? As far as she knows, she was the first in several generations to also show an aptitude for ice.” Ryu held out a hand between them, pausing to start a flurry of snow, a staff forming out of the ice. “Mom’s better at like, forming ice on her arms and legs, I’m better at construct type...things. Mom uses her magic more like I’ve seen you guys use it.” Not that he’d seen much except the few spars he’d passed on the way to finding Kuai Liang. “But hey, maybe we’re like, really really distant cousins!”

[cultdrifter]

Sometimes I just need someone to tell me that everything will be okay.

[sxvethelastdance]

"I am grateful... blessed to be with you, Liang." He has spoken these words in other lifetimes, other timelines, other Realms, perhaps, but right now, they are all that matters and all that floats between them and their world of only two.

“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. 

“May we be blessed a day more, and a day again.” His rough hands hold Hanzo’s face as he descends upon the man, first capturing his forehead and then his lips in a kiss.

[sxvethelastdance]

Scorpion crawls his skeletal ass up out of a spontaneously generated lava pit in the middle of Sub-Zero's boudoir--efficiency at its finest. "It is charming, if naive, that you thought death would release you from this relationship."

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.

“Come, my fire. Tell me of your journey.” He guides him to the place where they had lain together before, the place where they would lay again. 

[sxvethelastdance]

Sub-Zero. Truth + what was the first time like with Scorpion?

"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.”

"Truth or Dare" hour (closed)

[sxvethelastdance]

[Swinging plunger lazily on the end of its rope] Come here. [For once NOT shouted]

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.

“Now what are you going to do about it?”