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Raiden insists upon bringing all of them- including Allison and Emily- back to the temple after it’s all over, to patch their wounds and make absolutely certain that the last of the danger has passed. Cole wants nothing more than to be curled up in their bed at home with both of them, like they used to when they were broke twenty-somethings without heat and Emily was a toddler, but isn’t to be just yet.
When he looks down at his hands, speckled with blood up to the golden metal wound around his wrists, the mix of emotions that bubbles up is strange. There is pride, that is unmistakable- for the first time in his life, Cole Young is somebody, meant for more than being wailed on for the entertainment of gamblers and drunk college kids to make rent. He has always mattered to his family, and nothing could be more important than that, but it is something else entirely to realize that you matter to the world, even if no one he passes on the street will ever know.
But his life- all their lives- are suddenly much, much more complicated. And he cannot help but remember that it had been the strange specter born of his own blood- his ancestor? - to defeat the man who had nearly taken everything from him, not Cole himself.
He leaves them to sleep off their ordeal in a quiet room, both wrapped in what surely must be more blankets than necessary for anything beyond making him feel better at seeing them warm. Allison laughs and pulls him in for a kiss- they have so much to talk about, to decide, but it can wait until the morning. “You need to sleep too,” she reminds him, hovering the pad of her thumb over one of the cuts on his face. She has always hated how torn up he comes out after a fight, hated cataloguing the bruises beneath his clothes at night, and he doubts it is much consolation that these were earned in a victory. He squeezes her hand.
“I know. I won’t be too long.”
They have more to do, and even though the others would probably understand if he refused to ever leave this room again, he should be there.
---
He finds the rest of the champions gathered outside the great arching entrance to the temple, beneath an expanse of night sky dotted with the kind of stars you don’t see through the streetlights in the city. The other monks have built a platform of thick, dry branches hastily woven together- a pyre, he realizes- and Liu Kang stands hunched over it, whispering to a withered, soulless husk that disturbs Cole almost too much to look at it. They had expected to find the rest of him gone when they returned- spirited away perhaps to wherever Shang Tsung had taken the corpse of Sub-Zero- but it seemed that the sorcerer had devoured all he wanted and left the rest. Cole feels like he is intruding on something he doesn’t quite understand as Liu Kang slowly unwinds the ever-present strand of beads from his hand and wraps them around a skeletal palm, gently as he might handle a dry leaf that could crumble at the slightest touch.
He catches the flicker of Sonya’s eyes to his, and he meets them, just as tense and uncomfortable. It feels like a moment when someone should speak, but what would any of them say? They barely had the chance to know him. Raiden takes a step forward, but the glare Liu Kang shoots at him is stony enough to halt even a god. He shakes his head, small but firm, and when he speaks, his voice is rough with grief, and a strange undercurrent of anger simmering beneath it.
“I will do it.”
As the remaining champions of Earthrealm look on, he cups Kung Lao’s sunken cheek in one hand, thumb absently stroking along the ridge of bone. With a shaky breath, he closes his eyes and summons the flames.
Silence falls as the pyre begins to burn in earnest, sending up a thick plume of smoke to disrupt the tranquil blanket of stars. The glow of Raiden's eyes is hidden behind the edge of his hat, and the hard set of his mouth makes it impossible to guess what he is thinking. Jax and Sonya both stand at solemn attention, and Cole realizes that they must have watched their fellow soldiers lowered into the ground, maybe many times over.
He hasn’t been to a funeral since he lost his parents, and it is a struggle not to revisit that day. He shoves his hands deep into his pockets to keep from fidgeting, stepping back into line with the others, blinking away tears brought on as much by the sting of ash and smoke as by the loss of a man he could have someday called friend- a man whose final act had been to save Cole’s life.
And in front of them all, Liu Kang stands still as a statue, the blaze reflected in his dark eyes, refusing to look away.
---
After the fire has guttered out and they have made their way back inside, Sonya produces a handful of little plastic bottles of cheap vodka- the kind they hand out on airplanes- from her bag. With a tired grin, she hands one to Cole.
“Only one step above antiseptic, but I think we’ve earned it.” She twists off the cap and sinks onto a low bench before downing half of it in one swig. “And Kano drank all my beer.”
Cole and Jax both laugh at that, breathy with the strange sense of relief that has finally begun to set in. The temple is oddly silent without the crackle of the force-field buzzing in their ears and making their hair stand on end, and moreso for the knowledge that they have nothing to fear tonight from the expanse of desert beyond it. Cole might call it peaceful, had he any memories of peace to associate with it. Tonight, he supposes, will be the first.
It takes Jax a moment of fiddling to open his own bottle, despite the flaking dried blood he still hasn’t washed from his new arms giving testament to their strength. Sonya chuckles, raises a brow. “You got that, Major?”
He flops onto the bench beside her, knocking her knee with his with easy familiarity. “Yeah, yeah, can it. They’ve got the strength, the dexterity’s a work in progress.” He tips his head back and makes short work of the entire thing. “Hope this wasn’t it.”
Sonya laughs again, the sound a mix of exhaustion and exhilaration- a reminder that whatever else has come to pass today, she finally has what she has wanted for who knows how long. “Come on, you know me better than that.”
A glance back into the tunnel they had come through finds the three of them alone. Raiden had vanished wordlessly, all but melting into the night much more subtly than the searing-bright bolts of lightning that he had used to pull them with him. Cole still hasn’t quite wrapped his head around the fact that he has met a god - it is enough for an agnostic from Chicago to grapple with that such a person exists at all. They had certainly not expected him to join in any sort of socializing .
But that still leaves one missing.
Glancing into the fading black of another tunnel- the one that leads to the training pit, and the open air- Cole suddenly thinks he knows where he will be.
“Mind if I take one to go?”
With a knowing little nod, Sonya tosses him another bottle.
---
Liu Kang’s silhouette is easy to spot amongst the rubble, seated cross-legged on the bottom step, in the exact spot where their feet had left the ground as Cole had dragged him away. Sinking down beside him, Cole looks over but finds his eyes closed. It could be simple meditation but for a dozen little betrayals- the pained wrinkle of his brow, the tense set of his shoulders, the way his left hand twitches and clenches as it would have around his prayer beads. He must know that Cole is there, but makes no acknowledgement.
The silence, perhaps, could go on all night, but that won’t do either of them much good. So he taps the unopened bottle gently against Liu Kang's knee, keeps his voice low. “...Hey. Brought you something.”
With a sigh, Liu Kang turns to look at him. Though his eyes are red-rimmed and the hollows beneath them dark, his cheeks are still dry. On a glance at the label, he frowns. “I don’t…” Whatever objection it was trails off into nothing, and after a moment, he takes it, unscrewing the cap mechanically and taking a tentative sip.
When his face screws up in distaste, Cole huffs a soft laugh. “Sorry, it’s...pretty bad, I know.” There is no response, and as the quiet begins to set back in, Cole realizes that he has no idea what to say. Are you okay feels foolish, even insulting, but Cole knows too well that the usual platitudes are even worse. “That was…” he begins instead, swallowing around the memory of the tang of smoke and ash. “...I don’t know if I could have done that.” A pause. “...Earlier,” he clarifies pointlessly.
With his gaze once again fixed out on the sand and sky, Liu Kang replies, “It was...right that it be me.” It’s a prescribed answer, given in a dull, flat voice, and Cole immediately knows it for a lie, or at least a deflection. Beyond that, he knows the blankness, the way the mind retreats from what it cannot face. He knows it intimately. Without turning, and without any more life in his tone, Liu Kang murmurs, “We saved Earthrealm, for the time being. And your family. I am happy for you.”
He couldn’t sound less happy if he tried, but still, somehow Cole doubts it is a lie. In the few days- has it only been a few days? - since they met, he has been almost disarmingly sincere. He doesn’t strike Cole as the type to resent another for their happiness. Still, he finds himself swallowing around a guilty knot in his throat. “I...thanks. I’m...sorry we couldn’t save yours.”
The other man gives no more answer to that than he had expected, save for another flash of pain across his face, quickly schooled back into the careful mask of neutrality he has worn since Cole sat down. But the glimpse of what lies beneath it is enough to at least try to keep him talking, so Cole does the only thing he can think of, and offers a piece of himself in turn.
“You, uh,” he begins awkwardly, finding his own fixed point among the wreckage and sand to focus on, “told me that you were an orphan, the other day. ...I am too.” He lets it hang in the air, gauges the response, before continuing. “...Car wreck. I was eleven. They’d left me with a neighbor kid, I remember how excited I was for a night out of the house.”
He catches the moment Liu Kang’s eyes flick toward him, so he continues. “I...was angry for a long time. They’d always told me the world was fair, that if I was good then good things would come to me. I didn’t understand how something like that could happen if that was true.” He fiddles with the bandages wrapped around his knuckles. “I took it out on...anybody I could find, really. Got in a lot of fights, got passed around to a bunch of foster homes. ...‘Til I met Allison.” His face softens then, the way it always does when he talks about her. “She lived across the street from my last place. She...she showed me there was more to life than just wailing on anybody who looked at me sideways.”
Liu Kang’s lip twitches, and he takes another small sip of awful vodka. Cole answers with one of his own.
“We ran off as soon as we finished high school. Shouldn’t have, we were broke, but I was...afraid I’d get kicked out when I turned eighteen and I’d lose her.” His lips curl into a wry little smile. “Ended up in the cage instead of in college, and we had Emily before we were twenty. We were dumb kids, but I don’t think I’d do any of it differently.”
He isn’t quite sure what he expects when he finishes, but he hears Liu Kang suck in a shaky breath, and then begin to speak. “I...don’t remember my parents.” His voice is barely audible, torn raw, but he continues. “I used to yearn for them, but it was...abstract. There was nothing to miss.”
He says nothing else of his childhood, but Cole had caught the implications when he spoke of it before, and doesn’t press. That isn’t what matters right now.
“When I was...about eight, I suppose,” Liu Kang croaks, “I was curled up in an alley, half out of my mind with fever. I thought...thought that night would be the end of me. ...It might have been. But then a man came stumbling out of a tavern and tripped over me.” He huffs a little laugh, humorless and painful. “Master Bo’ Rai Cho. He had been drinking for hours and could barely stand upright. But he picked me up and carried me back to the Wu Shi Academy.” There is a tiny, fond smile on his face now. “Kung Lao told me once that he must have seen a glimpse of my destiny that night. But I think he simply felt guilty for stepping on me.”
Cole chuckles at that too, despite feeling like he shouldn’t. But Liu Kang’s expression remains soft as he continues, “I followed Kung Lao around like a shadow when I first arrived. It must have annoyed him. But it was the first time I could remember feeling safe.”
He trails off, and they both drain the little bottles in unison. Spots of pink have begun to creep up on Liu Kang’s cheeks, and Cole wonders if his initial objection had been that he didn’t drink at all. Maybe Sonya’s offerings should have been left in her pack.
“I wanted,” Liu Kang continues, voice unsteady, “so badly to be like him, to prove myself to Lord Raiden, but…”
Cole bites his lip, slipping the empty bottle back into his pocket. He imagines the disdain- or even a tenth of it- on Raiden’s face when he had told Cole that he had failed his legacy, but directed at an abandoned child. “Can’t imagine that was easy.”
Liu Kang shakes his head, and Cole again catches him running the pad of a thumb over his knuckles as though he expects the strand of beads to still be there. “I have looked to Lord Raiden’s guidance for so many years, and yet...he has always told us that he could only observe in our battles. Never interfere. Even in those days, he said so.” There is a bitter edge to his voice all of a sudden, as there had been before the pyre earlier that night. “He told me so again, after-" After we lost Kung Lao, he doesn't say, but it needs no clarification. “But,” Liu Kang breathes, wide, lost eyes suddenly meeting Cole’s own, “I learned tonight that he has always had a choice.”
Liu Kang is not the only one to have thought such a thing. Cole remembers the moment of confusion when Raiden had banished Shang Tsung with a single stroke- remembers wondering why he had not done so earlier. Had killing the other champions tipped some invisible balance of power, too subtle for mortals like him to understand? Or had his aid and his mercy truly been so arbitrary all along? If it was, why would he not extend it to the fighter he had nurtured and trained since birth?
It is far too much to even begin to unravel, especially as he begins to feel the sluggishness of exhaustion and drink begin to set in. But amid the tangle of his thoughts, another emerges, prickling hot and ugly in his chest.
“It’s not Raiden's…” he begins, words faltering as he switches and re-orders and softens them, for all the good it does. “Kung Lao, he...he jumped in to save me.” Liu Kang had not seen that, and shame settles in the pit of Cole's stomach at the admission. He wonders if there will be anger, if his new ally will hate him, blame him as much as he blames himself. “If I’d been stronger, if I’d mastered my arcana sooner, I could have-”
But then- “Don’t,” comes Liu Kang’s voice with sudden force, and he’s shaking his head again but with greater energy. The blood-red of the headband cuts like a gash across his forehead beneath his unkempt dark hair. “Don’t,” he says again, quieter this time. “You did not do this.” He takes a moment to breathe, to compose himself, though Cole can see the cracks beginning to form. “Even if you had been stronger, he still would have done what he did to help you. It is...simply who he was.”
Cole can’t argue with that, but it’s still hard not to dwell on the sense of weakness and defeat he has lived in like a second skin for so long. “I still...don’t feel ready for this,” he admits quietly. Today already feels like a fluke, a miracle that it would be testing the universe to hope to repeat. “There’s so much I still don’t understand about all this. I’ve had this damn mark for my entire life, I wish- I wish Raiden had found me sooner, trained me like you guys.”
But Liu Kang shakes his head.
“No, Cole. You were...fortunate,” he murmurs, fiddling absently with the cap of the little plastic bottle, eyes fixed there again rather than on Cole’s face. “To have had the chance to grow up without knowing. Kung Lao never had that chance.” The quiet remembrance has returned to his voice, his gaze far away. “He tried to keep it hidden, even from me, but it...ate at the very core of him, to have the fate of all of Earthrealm on his shoulders. To fear that he would fail us all. It was too much to put on any one person.”
His lips curl into another sad little smile. “All my life, all I wanted was that mark. Not because I wanted to fight, but because I never wanted him to have to go somewhere that I could not follow.”
If we were to die, it was supposed to be together.
There’s something buried in Liu Kang’s eyes as they finally begin to shine with the tears he has buried all day, something Cole knows, and suddenly everything, every little hint, clicks into place and knocks the air from his lungs like a kick to the gut. "I- fuck I'm so sorry," he breathes, stomach dropping, hand clamped over his mouth. This was a mistake. He’s pried too deep, but there’s nothing he can do to take it back now. They have so much more in common than even he had realized, and for the thousandth time in his life, he returns to the thought that the world is deeply, miserably unfair. He has to say something, so he swallows, feeling like an idiot, and asks quietly, “...Why didn’t you tell us?”
Liu Kang’s jaw is quivering now from the effort to stem the flood, his nails digging crescents into the skin of his palms. “Lord Raiden, he-” his voice cracks, but he continues, “he worried that we would be a liability if anyone knew. That the enemy could use us against each other, or- or that we might value each other above our duty to Earthrealm.” Cole frowns, nearly objects, but Liu Kang shakes his head again, voice dropping to an intense whisper as the first traitorous tear escapes him. “He was right. If you had not pulled me away, I- I would have thrown myself at Shang Tsung and surely followed him. And then the battle would truly have been lost.” He says it not as a boast, but as a simple fact that Cole knows to be the truth. He, Jax, and Sonya could not have done this on their own, and certainly could not face the tournament without him. Liu Kang buries his face in his hands, but there is no hiding the wetness streaking down his cheeks. “But- I wish I had. I should have.” The last of it is barely audible.
“...I let him go alone.”
The dam breaks, and there is nothing Cole can do to stop it. All he can do is place an awkward, comforting hand on the smaller man’s back, feeling it shake as he falls apart utterly. “You can’t think like that,” he murmurs over the sort of guttural, broken sobs that tear his heart out no matter who they come from. In a way this is why he had come- to reach out, to not let Liu Kang sink into the numb pit of grief from which it feels impossible to claw free- but maybe that had been futile from the start. “Whatever you said to each other…don’t you think he would want you to live, to be safe?” He may as well be talking to himself now, but he talks all the same. “If...if something happens to me in this tournament, I would- I would want Allison to be able to be happy again. Someday.”
Liu Kang curls in on himself, hair shielding his face like a curtain, and Cole gets the impression that he is unused to such shows of vulnerability- save, perhaps, in front of someone who is no longer here to soothe them. After a long moment of uncomfortable silence, he croaks, barely audible, “Why are you here, Cole?”
“I didn’t want you to be out here alone,” he says simply, honestly. But it isn’t entirely simple, and he sighs. “The way you looked earlier, I just...I know how that feels. I know nothing I say is really going to help, but I just...thought somebody should try.”
Muffled behind his hands, Liu Kang lets out a miserable little laugh. “That is...kind of you. But it’s....alright.” It isn’t, of course, nothing is alright, but what else is there to say in moments like this? “You can go,” he whispers. “Be with your family.”
It’s a dismissal, just as it had been when Raiden said it, but a kinder one. Cole is reluctant, but the other man at least seems to have calmed enough to breathe. Cole has pushed enough, maybe it is time to let him be alone. After all, for all they have been through, they were still strangers a few impossibly short days ago. So he nods, lifts his hand away from Liu Kang’s trembling shoulder blade, but pauses before he moves to stand. “I...okay. But it sounds like we’re in this thing for the rest of our lives, so...the way I see it, that makes you guys my family too.”
Liu Kang meets his eyes for a final time at that, face puffy and red, wrung out but alive, and that is the best Cole can hope for. “....Thank you.”
Cole groans softly as he gets to his feet, the soreness of a hundred blows setting in deeper and deeper with every passing moment sitting still, and the yearning for Allison’s embrace suddenly all but unbearable. The sand he had picked from his cuts in the ring is oddly beautiful now, glittering subtly in the moonlight, deceptively peaceful despite its purpose. They’ll have to clear away the broken chunks of stone in the morning, if he’s still here. He makes it up the first step, but something stops him, and he turns back to the man still hunched at his feet.
“Tomorrow morning,” he says, tripping awkwardly over the words. “Before I leave. Spar with me.” It is a hand offered to keep from drowning, if Liu Kang will take it. It is don’t do anything stupid tonight, no matter how badly you might want to be anywhere but here. Wake up in the morning, no matter how much you never want to wake up again. It is a reminder that no matter what life wrenches from your grasp, there is nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. “Don’t wanna get soft. We still have a tournament to win.”
For him. For everyone we love. He doesn’t say that either, but the tiny flicker in Liu Kang’s eyes tells him that he heard it all the same. He nods, and offers the faintest ghost of a smile.
"...Sunrise. Do not be late."