@coldstoicism gets a random starter. Hanzo -> Bi-Han (Sub-Zero)
▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 || Hanzo Hasashi breathes, and even that is a violence to him. For so long breath was fire, every inhale a furnace, every exhale an inferno that devoured his own flesh as surely as it immolated his enemies. Scorpion had not needed air - only wrath, only vengeance stoked like a pyre until there was no room for anything but flame. And yet now, as his chest convulses and the mask clatters useless from his hand, he feels the old human frailty rush back in; the desperate thirst for oxygen, the rasp of lungs that are too soft, too breakable. His body remembers mortality in all its cruel detail.
The transition is agony disguised as awakening. Where once the hellfire had sustained him, unyielding, now it smolders unsteadily inside a vessel of blood and bone. The duality tears him apart - every nerve screams with the heat that wants to consume, while muscle and sinew protest, fragile, threatening collapse beneath its burden. His veins feel both molten and starved, as though he is suffocating in flame and drowning in absence at once. For every flicker of Scorpion that snarls to rise again, there is Hanzo - the man who has tasted loss more bitter than any inferno - dragging him back toward flesh. The transformation from Scorpion to Hanzo is not a triumph - it is dissonance. Where hellfire had once sustained him, he now feels the thinness of mortal blood in his veins. His lungs, which had known only the roar of flame, seize and stumble over something as simple as air. Oxygen is a foreign invader, flooding him in uneven bursts, and he cannot decide if he is starved or drowning. The mortal frame trembles beneath the heat inside him, and for every flicker of power, there is the crushing reminder that he can die again - and more painfully, he can feel.
He lies suspended between the two; a revenant’s fury cracking within his ribs, and the mortal weakness of a man who had once held his son in quiet arms. His hands tremble. He remembers holding swords that burned hotter than the sun itself; now those same hands falter, bloodless and clumsy, unable even to still their shaking against the hospital linens. His heart, which once thundered only with vengeance, now stutters unevenly, searching for a rhythm it had long forgotten.
And then - the scent. That familiar frost-laden presence, cutting sharper than the air clawing down his throat. It pierces through fire and flesh alike, grounding him in a truth far crueler than the war between Scorpion and Hanzo. He knows it instinctively, knows it as deeply as he knows the moment of his own death. The smell of Bi-Han was the last sensation etched into him before darkness claimed him forever - the cold perfume of the man who ended him. To breathe it again is to live his dying all over. The image strikes him unbidden; his own corpse, despoiled and discarded, the spine torn free, and his specter rising in vengeance. He sees himself again in that tournament, fire coiling, blade striking, the echo of Raiden’s plea falling upon deaf ears as Scorpion carved his revenge into the wrong flesh. He had thought it justice. Now it sits upon his soul like a weight too heavy to bear.
The blade at his throat is almost a mercy. He tilts his head into it, surrender written not in words but in the slow slackening of every muscle. The fire inside him flickers low, weary of the struggle between revenant and man. The mask he had torn free dangles loosely from his hand, fingers slack with surrender. His body no longer belongs to him - it is a battlefield of elements, a war of flame and frailty - and his soul is weary of fighting in it. He has no Shirai Ryu to guide him, no clan waiting to follow. Harumi’s voice is gone from his dreams; Satoshi’s laughter no longer haunts the corners of his memory. Where once their absence had fed his fury, now it only echoes in silence. The fire is no longer a promise of vengeance but a burden without purpose.
Depression seeps in quietly, like ink into water. He realizes, with a clarity that guts him, that there is nothing left to return to. All his battles, all his rage, all the blood spilled - it has built nothing. He has clawed his way back into flesh only to find it empty. He is no champion, no husband, no father, no leader. He is a man displaced, a revenant stripped of fury, a mortal stripped of family. Even his own consciousness feels fractured, slipping in and out like a tide that cannot decide whether to leave him in darkness or force him to wake again.
The blade against his throat is almost a kindness. He tilts his head, exposing the vulnerable line of his neck, not out of defiance but because he no longer has the strength to resist. His eyes, heavy-lidded, find no reason to remain open. The world has become a weight too sharp, too cold, too empty. His voice, when it comes, is rough, unmoored, the rasp of one who has carried too many ashes in his lungs. Hanzo feels the blade tremble - so slight a shift it could almost be the shiver of his own pulse against the steel, yet he knows it is not. The hesitation is there, caught in the air between them like a taut string pulled to breaking. Bi-Han’s hand is steady, always steady, and yet the weight pressing at his throat does not descend. The cut does not come. Death, which Hanzo had all but opened himself to, hangs suspended.
His lids half-close, lashes shadowing the exhaustion in his gaze, but within that dimness he feels it; the pause, the cold deliberation behind Bi-Han’s silence. It is not mercy - not yet. Mercy would have been swift. This is something else. Contemplation, perhaps. A recognition that sears almost as much as the steel.
Hanzo’s heart, fragile and faltering, stutters once more. For a revenant, hesitation was a weakness. For Scorpion, hesitation was impossible - he had struck, always, without doubt. Yet here stands Bi-Han, weapon poised at the hollow of his throat, and he cannot finish what once was done without pause. Hanzo feels the cold of that contemplation sink into him deeper than any frost. It is not a reprieve. It is a mirror.
“End me.”
The words fall not like a demand, but like resignation - soft, defeated, as though even speech is too heavy to carry. His shoulders sag, every muscle loosening in surrender. He is not asking for justice, not even for revenge. He is asking for release, for the silence that might finally still the war between Scorpion and Hanzo, between fire and flesh, between grief and nothingness. And in that plea, his depression coils fully around him - not loud, not violent, but crushing in its certainty. He is a man who has survived too much only to find survival itself hollow. Death seems the only mercy left, and he offers himself to it not with courage, nor fear, but with the numb acceptance of one who has nothing left to ignite him. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 ||
