@yeoumopi gets a random starter since I'm unhinged -
💥|| The building comes apart in the particular way that buildings do when the load-bearing logic has been removed from them - not all at once, not with the cinematic grandeur of a controlled demolition, but in sequence, one structural argument failing and taking the next one with it, a cascading collapse of everything that was holding everything else up.
Hanzo is on the fourth floor when the east stairwell decides it is no longer a stairwell.
He knows what has happened to his arm before he looks at it. The body sends the signal in a register beneath pain - pain comes later, pain is the body's editorial, its after-the-fact accounting of damage.
What arrives first is wrongness. The absolute sensory certainty that something which was load-bearing is no longer load-bearing, and that the architecture of the self has been compromised at a structural level.
He looks at it.
He makes the calculation in the time it takes to make a calculation - which is no time at all, which is the trained compression of assessment into a single point of clarity - and the calculation says: this stays, you don't. The arm below the elbow is making an argument the rest of him cannot afford to listen to. He has carried men out of worse geometry than this. He knows what the variables look like when they stop being variables and become fixed costs.
"Singh," he says, and his voice is the voice he uses in briefings. No temperature. No theatre. "Tourniquet. Now. Above the joint."
Singh's hands are already moving before the sentence finishes. This is why Singh is in Alpha. Hanzo notes this with the part of his mind that is always, even now, running the personnel assessment.
The rest of what follows is technical and terrible and he will not grant it more significance than it has earned.
She comes through the smoke.
He sees her before she sees him - Hinokari moving through the particulate ruin of the fourth floor with the narrowed clarity he watched form in her, the one that appeared in crisis simulations and that he understood was not trained into her but revealed in her, the supply closet of an ICU made operative, made weapon, made this: a figure in Beta colors crossing rubble like rubble is simply the current texture of the ground.
She finds him.
He watches her eyes do the thing her mother's eyes do - the rapid, total intake of a situation, the assessment that does not look like assessment because it has been internalized past the point of visible effort. He watches her see his arm. He watches her not react to seeing his arm, which is the correct response, which he taught her, which still costs her something he can see only because he knows exactly where to look.
"Sir." Her voice is even. Her hands are already moving to his position, already calculating load and angle and extraction vector. "I have you."
"I am aware," he says, "of who has me."
There are three of them carrying him out - protocol, terrain, the specific arithmetic of a compromised stairwell and two floors of structural uncertainty between them and the roof. He does not know the names of the other two in this moment and then he does, because he always knows, because his personnel files are a permanent resident of his working memory; Okafor, Beta. Reyes, Charlie. Both of them solid. Both of them running the correct calculations, moving at the correct speed, reading each other without needing to speak.
Hinokari is at his left side.
His left side, which is the side of the arm, the side of the thing that is no longer the shape it was this morning, the side that is currently wrapped and tourniqueted and telling him, with the patient insistence of serious damage, that the editorial on this is going to be substantial.
She does not avoid it. She positions herself exactly where she is needed, takes his weight at the point where weight is most efficient to take, and she moves with him without making him feel moved.
He recognizes this. He has done it himself, for other men, in other burning architecture. The art of carrying someone without diminishing them. He did not teach her this specifically. She arrived at it anyway, from the same direction he did.
The thought is brief. He does not pursue it.
The pain announces itself properly on the second floor.
He has a high threshold - this is documented, this is also simply true, the product of a life that has regularly presented him with experiences designed to locate the threshold and he has regularly declined to be located. But the body is not a philosophy. The body has its own position on what is happening to it, and two floors of movement with a field amputation is the body's opportunity to make that position known at volume.
He does not make a sound.
Hinokari's grip on him adjusts - fractionally, immediately, precisely at the point where the shift in his weight has telegraphed what he will not say. She does not ask if he is alright. She does not offer reassurance. She simply responds to the data of him with the kind of absolute present-tense attention that does not have room in it for anything except what is happening right now.
He thinks: she learned this from her mother. He thinks: she also learned it from watching me, in an ICU window, at seventeen. He does not think this for long. There is a stairwell to navigate.
The roof. The helicopter already dropping toward them, the sound of it arriving through his chest, through the arm that isn't there the way it was there this morning, through the specific exhaustion of a body that has been doing its internal emergency accounting and is beginning to present the bill.
They get him to the landing zone.
Hinokari does not release him until he is down, until the angle is right, until the transfer is clean. Then she steps back with the correctness of someone who has delivered a thing to the place it needed to be and is now returning to the position that the mission requires.
He is looking at the sky, which is the specific white-grey of a day that has not decided what it intends to be, and then he turns his head, because there is a thing that needs to be said and Hanzo Hasashi does not leave load-bearing things unsaid simply because the architecture around them is inconvenient.
She is there. She is looking at him with the expression he has never been able to fully decode - the one that is too layered for a single feeling, too disciplined for what it is actually costing her, the one she inherited from Miharu and that means she is holding more than she is showing, which is always, with his daughter, a very great deal.
He holds her gaze.
"You stayed," he says. Three words, and not three words - the whole of what he means is in the space the words are standing in front of, the thing he cannot say on a rooftop in front of operatives, the thing he has already said in every morning that was still tea and not this, in every again that meant I believe you capable of more, in every correction offered in front of the group because she deserved the real version of everything.
You stayed. You were the last out. You learned the right thing.
She looks at him for a moment - one breath, the same duration he allowed himself at the range in the grey evening light - and something moves through her expression like weather moving through a landscape: seen, and then past.
"The mission," she says, "is the people you brought with you."
His own words. From no briefing, from no documented philosophy. From tea, in the mornings, in the space where they talked about everything else. Carried inside her all this time, load-bearing, doing the quiet structural work of a thing that has been decided absolutely.
The helicopter settles.
The rotors are very loud.
He turns his eyes back to the white-grey sky and he breathes, controlled and steady, the way he taught breath to be - ready, and refusing to be otherwise - and the thing without a name in the deep architecture of his chest is there, pulled taut, holding.
She is the last out.
She learned it from him.
He has become the beginning of her, and she has become the evidence of it, and the arm that is no longer the shape it was this morning and the white sky and the rooftop full of smoke and soldiers cannot change the specific mathematics of what she is and how she came to be it.
He closes his eyes.
He does not let go of anything. 💥||
