"Why do you listen to them? Why do you take orders from them? You don't have to obey everything they tell you. And yet..you do."
AND WEAPONS DON'T WEEP: STARTERS || @voidisms || accepting
▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| Scorpion does not answer immediately. He breathes - or performs the theater of breathing, the old habit of a living man wearing a dead man's skin - and the hellfire behind his mask gutters and swells like something furious caught inside a lantern, pressing its palms against the glass.
His head turns. Slowly. The way a blade turns in a wound.
Obey.
The word lands on him like an insult that has grown barnacles - ancient, corroded, cutting still. His gauntleted hands curl at his sides, fingers finding the shape of weapons they have not yet drawn, and the motion is liturgical, devotional, the muscle-scripture of a man who has made killing into a kind of prayer. He does not look at the Outsider. He looks through him, past him, into some architecture of memory and hatred that only Scorpion can see.
He does not obey the demons.
Let that be understood as bedrock. Let that be the foundation upon which whatever remains of Hanzo Hasashi still stands - cracked, blackened, but standing. He has slaughtered things that called themselves lords of the Netherrealm. He has walked those sulfur-choked corridors where things ancient and unnameable press their faces against the membrane of existence and wept for the mercy of his spear through their throats.
The Netherrealm does not command Scorpion. He is its executor, its red right hand, its sentence passed upon the deserving. He could reduce it to charnel silence. He could make of every shadow-throne a monument of ash and opened ribcage. He could and he knows he could, and that knowing lives in him like a second fire - cleaner than hellfire, more honest - the fire of a man who understands exactly the weight of what he carries.
But there are chains that leave no mark on the wrist.
Quan Chi's architecture is not iron. It is not visible. It is something threaded through the seams of his existence, sewn into the place where death and life refuse to resolve into one another, where Scorpion hangs - perpetually - like a word caught in a throat, never swallowed, never spoken.
He is not alive. He is not granted the mercy of oblivion. He exists in the between, in the liminal corridor where the door behind him has been bricked over and the door ahead refuses to open, and Quan Chi holds the key with a sorcerer's casual contempt, spinning it once, twice, between clever fingers.
So he serves.
He serves because the alternative is dissolution into something worse than death - a nothingness that is not rest, a darkness that is not peace, a silence that is not his. He serves because the cage has no visible bars, and a man cannot break what he cannot find, cannot rage against what has been stitched into the architecture of his soul like load-bearing walls.
But inside - inside -
Something screams.
Something that remembers a woman's voice. The specific weight of a child's sleeping body. The smell of a dojo at dawn, wood-oil and incense and the clean sweat of purpose. That remnant of Hanzo Hasashi - small, stubborn, infuriatingly unkillable - still throws itself against the walls Scorpion has built around it, still beats its fists bloody, still refuses the mercy of silence.
His wrath is not merely a demon's wrath. His hunger for vengeance is not the clean, cold appetite of something that was never human. It is human in its excess, human in its heat, human in the way it cannot be reasoned with, cannot be satisfied, cannot be made to heel - and that humanity, paradoxically, is the sharpest thing left in him.
He wants to kill.
Not because he is commanded. Because Hanzo Hasashi wanted justice, and justice was never given, and the long corridor of his unlife has transformed that wanting into something vast and volcanic, into a need that fills every hollow in his chest with smokeless fire.
When the spear leaves his hand it is not obedience. When the screaming begins it is not performance. It is the only prayer still left to him - the only language in which whatever is left of his soul still speaks with any clarity.
Finally - finally - he looks directly at the Outsider.
The hellfire finds his eyes.
He does not explain himself. He does not justify. He simply allows the Outsider to see what is there; the understanding, ancient and immovable, that freedom is not the same as power, that a man can be capable of burning down everything and still be unable to burn down the one thing that matters. That there are architectures of bondage more sophisticated than any chain.
Then he turns away.
Because there is work to be done.
And he will do it - burning, raging, screaming in the locked room of himself - until the debt is paid, or the universe ends, or Hanzo Hasashi finally, mercifully, forgets what it felt like to be alive. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||
