#Hanzo bolts in from across the base like

[running-with-the-feels]

Kotal Kahn: You are a delightfully odd little creature

Kuai Liang: What the fuck does that mean?

Johnny, from the other room: It means you're weird and he wants to fuck you about it.

[lo-55]

Blessed Brothers Ch. 3

Quiet Encounters                     

     Jesse McCree is seven years old the first time he gets pinched. It’s not much, a slap on the wrist from an officer, a scare, and they call his Mama. It’s her that really scares him. Not the officers with the shiny guns and badges or the man that had kicked a child in the ribs to get his wallet back. His Mama has a fury like no other, one she doesn’t even try to hide behind the closed doors on 1309 Country Rd. He leaves soon after, going to better places, he thinks. In some ways he’s right.  

     Jesse is seventeen to the day when Overwatch breaks down the door to Deadlock’s hideout. He spends a week in a holding cells before Gabrial Reyes sweeps in with Jack Morrison and the world tips around on its axis.  

     When Jesse is just shy of twenty seven he gets called into Reyes’ office. He walks in and faces down red eyes. There’s battlefire in them, fury and pain overriding the person that could have existed inside of them. The laugh lines that were starting to show up on the mangled face are twisted hard into a straight mouth that hides teeth. Jesse saw the before, the mangled corpse that Angela Ziegler brought new life into. Now he meets the after. Genji Shimada.  

 At thirty seven, many things in Jesse McCree’s life have come and gone. 1309, Deadlock, Blackwatch, they all faded into the past until he found himself where he thought he would never be.

 In Overwatch once more. Only now, all the bureaucracy has been taken out of it. He knows they’ll have to do unsavory things. He knows it, Genji knows it, Soldier : 76 knows it. Hanzo probably knows it too.  

 Some of these kids that answered the call, they have no idea some of the things that have been done in the name of peace.

 Jesse is perfectly content to keep them in the light, where they won’t have to see what’s done in shadows.

 Jesse blows out a stream of smoke as the the clouds gather. It drifts away into the air, vanishing into the grey sky. Clouds roll across his vision and he leans back on the wall of the Watchpoint, letting the cement dig into his shoulders through the sarape.

 Genji and Hanzo are inside somewhere, still on base. Lucio is with them, and Winston. Everyone else was deployed over the last few days. Soldier : 76 gave up running things. In fact he hadn’t tried to take back his place at all.

 Jesse figured he had enough of that, in the past.

 Jack Morrison was supposed to be dead. Seeing him again-

 Jesse would deny to his dying day that had taken one look at him and bolted. He couldn't handle talking to Jack for almost a week afterwards. Even now, he avoided him when he could.

 The soft sound of the door sliding open is the only reason he knows when Hanzo walks out of the base. He takes two steps and stops, turning his dark eyes to Jesse, who nods at him cordially.

 He doesn’t say anything, even though he wants to. Hanzo doesn’t look much like he can handle talking right then. He’s stone still, he’s tough, strong. Still, Jesse knows what it feels like when someone you thought was dead comes back from the grave and his relationship with Morrison pales in comparison to what Hanzo has on his plate.

 So Jesse just smiles at him and let’s the man go on his way.

 Only, Hanzo doesn’t leave. He stands where he is, staring hard at. He’s looking for something.

 Jesse thinks that, on another man, he might have been shifting uneasily.

 Finally, Hanzo’s shoulders drop and the air leaves his lungs. He disappears with the breeze. Jesse wonders if he saw what he was looking for.

[familyiswhoyouchoose]

To Us (FIWYC)

Chapter Summary

Hanzo and Jesse have a heart to heart, and the cowboy gains a new title.

When Jesse opened his eyes, the first thing that he noticed was the thing tucked beneath his arm. It was soft and squishy, barely noticeable, but against the dark blue duvet and off-white sheets, it was very noticeable. Blinking awake, Jesse shifted slightly and stared at the duvet then the sheets and finally the thing tucked beneath his arm. Tiny horns stuck from the top of its head, and its snout reminded him of a dragon’s. Though it was much smaller, less threatening, and far more cuddly than the dragons he’d seen tearing into bodies on the field. In fact, it almost seemed child-sized.

A child-sized dragon.

The sleep-filled haze lifted and Jesse almost bolted upright if not for the arm wrapped around his waist keeping him close to its owner. Face frozen in fear, he slowly turned to face the half-asleep gaze of Hanzo Shimada. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of the man’s dark eyes boring into his own. Dark hair fanned against white pillows, brown eyes cracked open and observing him, a kaleidoscope of emotions reflecting through them. Jesse swallowed thickly, parting his lips but no words would come forth. He vaguely remembered coming to Hanzo’s room, the dragons beckoning him forth, seeing the boys fast asleep. And at the time it seemed like a good idea but now panic was slowly setting in.

The sun had already risen, it was more than likely late, he was intruding in Hanzo’s home — his children’s home. He had to get out, he had to go before —

“Jesse, breathe,” Hanzo muttered, the arm around Jesse’s waist tightening, the pressure bringing him down from the adrenaline high of anxiety. “I am here, Jesse. You are safe.”

It was almost embarrassing how quickly Hanzo could calm him. His heartbeat slowing to normal, breathing evening out, and hand ceasing its trembling. A pricking sensation at the corner of his eyes alerted him to the tears that threatened to fall. Hanzo’s finger swiping at the corner of them, dismissing the moisture before it had a chance to make its descent. Then with care, the archer’s hand cupped his cheek, fingers lacing into his hair and petting gently. Jesse groped around for the small dragon and lifted it up, laying it between them as Hanzo shifted closer to press their foreheads together.

After his shuddering sobs and gasping breaths ceased, Jesse dared to open his eyes, waiting until the blur of tears passed. Hanzo’s face coming into view and the emotions in his eyes shaking Jesse to his core. The hand petting his hair slipping down to lay against his chest, Hanzo’s lips brushing against the corner of his lips, a tender kiss pressed to both eyelids then the middle of his forehead. Endearments whispered in Japanese that Jesse vaguely remembered being spoken in his ear as he fell into a deep sleep the night before. Endearments whispered in the deep comforting voice that lulled him to sleep like the waves crashing against the shore, gently pulling him back into a warm embrace.

If Hanzo’s voice was the ocean, Jesse would gladly dive deep.

“May I kiss you?” Hanzo asks, and Jesse opens his eyes, noting the soft smile that eases the knots in his stomach.

“Y’know you ain’t gotta ask for that, Han.”

Hanzo shakes his head, though his gaze momentarily flicks to Jesse’s lips before raising to meet his own.

“Although our relationship is intimate, I am not entitled to your personal space nor your affections if it is not what you wish to give,” he explains, wincing slightly before drawing in a deep breath and a heavy sigh. “What you want is important to me, and I need to h—”

Jesse leans closer and their lips meet, cutting Hanzo off in mid-sentence. And as much as Jesse knows the archer hates to be interrupted when he is talking, before his eyes slip closed, he feels Hanzo’s fingers thread in his hair and pull him closer. Gentle chaste kisses, light pecks, pulling away and being brought back as the other chases, Hanzo’s hand in Jesse’s hair petting and lightly scratching at his scalp, a pleased hum emitting from the cowboy as he relinquishes his hold on the plush left perched on his chest. His hand finding the curve of Hanzo’s bicep, lightly tracing the outlines of his muscle, delighting in the way the archer shivers and he can’t tell whether it’s his smile or Hanzo’s that breaks the kiss but it doesn’t matter.

Looking into Hanzo’s eyes, Jesse can’t help but smile. Hanzo is a man of mystery who picks and choose what he wishes others to know and what he doesn’t. On more than one occasion, it was hard for Jesse to associate his best friend’s murderer with the man who would walk through the base with a child on his hip and another at his side, covered in snow with rosy-red cheeks. The smiles Hanzo would give him, the sheer joy he had being a father, the consideration he gave to the other agents.

And yet, he was also the man who would sit on the roof at the dead of night with only a gourd full of his choice of poison and thoughts to keep him company. Jesse thought the only thing keeping him from going over were his sons and his debt to Genji. He wondered what kept Hanzo going. What made him get up everyday? What pushed him to keep moving forward even when it felt like all was lost?

So when Jesse looked at him like this. The light in his eyes, openness in his expression, vulnerable yet unfearing, loving and all for Jesse — it made him feel as if he’d hung the moon and the stars in the sky and Hanzo was just in awe of him.

Darlin’, you’re the amazing one.

Taking a sobering breath, Jesse tore his gaze from Hanzo’s and eyed the plush watching him impassively from its perch on his chest. Running his fingers across the worn silver-white scales, he chuckled.

“Seems we had a visitor,” he says softly, a thrill running through him when Hanzo’s hand joins his own, overlapping their fingers to brush through the plush’s mane.

“Hayao has a habit of trying to ‘get me’,” Hanzo rolls his eyes and Jesse can’t help but laugh.

“Get you?”

“Yes, he seems to believe that if he can surprise me when I’m least expecting it, then his… ‘ninja skills’ will have gotten better.”

Jesse cocks a brow and turns to look at Hanzo who meets his gaze with a  small smile.

“Genji,” they say in unison, sharing a laugh.

Jesse squeezes the plush a little tighter. It is very soft and well-loved. More than once, he’d seen it poking out of Hanzo’s laundry basket as an eager little Hayao came barreling into the room, waiting for his father’s permission to take his dragon and flee. It warmed Jesse’s heart seeing the boy bouncing up and down with bated breath only to yell loud in excitement once his friend was returned to him. When no one else was present, or at least when Jesse stayed out and let the moment play out, watching from around the corner — Hanzo would dip down so his son could press a kiss to his cheek, a quiet “Arigatou, otou-san” said before Hayao hurries out, making a beeline for wherever his brother might’ve been.

Hanzo would appear shortly after, laundry basket on his hip, caught off guard by the presence outside the door but never defensive. It was one of the things that Jesse loved about him. Watching his retreating back, his son’s hand in his own, the latter skipping while Hanzo keeps a steady stride.

A little family.

“If there was any doubt that Hayao did not care for you,” Hanzo interrupts, and Jesse wonders if this is becoming a routine — running away with his thoughts only for Hanzo to bring him back to reality. Though if it was, then he wasn’t complaining. “Then I believe this should put them to rest.”

“Should it?”

“It isn’t a child’s toy,” Hanzo looks at the dragon with a wistful sigh, tucking his head against Jesse’s shoulder. “Like your hat or my hair scarf, this(his fingers trace over the dragon’s horn) is important to Hayao. When he was three, he tried to climb a tree without supervision and fell.”

Jesse’s breath hitched, “He didn’---”

“No,” Hanzo scowled. “Before he could sustain injury, Shingen caught him though he injured his ankle in the process. Hayao cried thinking he’d hurt Shingen and wouldn’t let him go for anything in the world.”

“Sounds like he learned his lesson,” Jesse brushed his lips against the crown of Hanzo’s head, the archer humming contentedly.

“Perhaps, but Shingen told me he saw something when Hayao fell, a silver mist that kept him suspended in mid-air long enough for Shingen to reach him.”

Jesse looked down at Hanzo and tried to wrap his head around this. Even Genji couldn’t tell him what the Dragons were. Their very existence seemed like something out of a fairy tale. And Jesse had his own personal grudges against them more or less for allowing the brothers to fight as they did. However, he guessed he could call it even. Hanzo and Genji made their choice, and if the spirits were protecting those kids who’d yet to embrace the cruelty of the real world — well, that might be enough for him.

“So this is supposed to be his dragon,” Jesse said, a newfound affection overcoming him for the plush that seemed much fiercer than it did a minute ago, but in a way that made him feel safe. “A lot cuddlier than yours.”

Hanzo chuckled, and Jesse could hear the faint sound of rumbling thunder in the back of his mind. “You should not say such things when the dragons have shown you leniency, Jesse,” he chided.

It took Jesse a moment to realize Hanzo was pulling his leg, the telling sign being the archer’s lips twitching up into a smile breaking his stoic expression. Rolling his eyes heavenward as Hanzo laughed, burying his face against Jesse’s neck, his body shaking with pure joy.  When he pulled away, Jesse’s breath hitched, Hanzo’s eyes shone a faint light blue that reminded Jesse of a clear summer sky. His smile threatened to split his face, and he seemed so young and happy, but the look in his eye when he met Jesse’s gaze was unmistakable. It had many names: affection, adoration, infatuation, cheer, joy, warmth — but the one Jesse settled on was love.

Unable to stop himself, Jesse said, “You’re beautiful.”

Hanzo’s smile fell and Jesse blinked absently, the weight of his words settling in the silence between them. Panic surged through him as Hanzo shifted closer until the two of them were practically nose to nose. Staring into the eyes of a dragon, Jesse remembered that Hanzo wasn’t alwayscute and cuddly. The same perfect teeth that flashed in one of the archer’s rare smiles could rip him in half. Jesse gulped, hoping that now was not one of those times.

“You,” Hanzo replied, and Jesse’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline as he waited for the other shoe to fall but it never did.

“Me?”

Hanzo nodded, tilting his head slightly, eyes half-lidded as their lips brushed together. Jesse a half-step slower than Hanzo as the other man pulled away.

“What about me, darlin’?” Jesse mumbled, looking from Hanzo’s eyes to his lips then back.

Instead of answering, Hanzo’s hands framed the sides of Jesse’s head, fingers tangling in his hair. Their lips slotted together and Jesse practically melted in Hanzo’s hands, encased by the warmth and pressing into the kiss, letting his eyes slip shut. Little breaks between soft open-mouthed kisses, allowing both men to have room for a pocket of air before they met again in the middle. Jesse shifting to lay on his side, chest bumping against Hanzo’s, hand splayed against the archer’s back, bringing him closer.

Every last one of his senses was taken over by Hanzo and Jesse was glad to let go even if it was short-lived. When the kiss ended, Hanzo’s forehead bumped against his own, and they breathed the same air while trying to come down from an indescribable high. Though before Jesse could even out his breathing, Hanzo stole it away.

“You are beautiful.”

The cowboy’s eyes shot open. Doubting his hearing for a second, he muttered a soft ‘huh’.

Hanzo eyed him without a word and Jesse tried not to fidget or squirm beneath his gaze. Then with a soft smile, Hanzo bid him closer with the hands tucked in his hair, pressing their foreheads together. “You are beautiful, Jesse,” he whispers with such tenderness and sincerity that Jesse’s admonishments floating about in his head are silenced.

“Make no mistake that you are a wonderful man. Despite all that the world has done, you still believe that it can be saved, and you try . You are your own man, a hero in your own right,” Hanzo opened his eyes and looked into Jesse’s, thumb catching a few of the strays tears that rolled down the cowboy’s cheek. “You are my hero, Jesse.”

“I didn’ do nothin’ special,” Jesse groused, leaning into Hanzo’s touch.

“You saved me from myself, helped me…” Hanzo continued, thumb stroking along Jesse’s cheekbones.

Misty-eyed and dry-mouthed, Jesse wasn’t sure what to say to that. He squeezed his eyes shut, unsuccessfully keeping the welled up tears from falling. “I messed up though…”

“And yet you are trying,” Hanzo pulled him closer and he bowed his head, burying his face in Hanzo’s shoulder, the long strands of his hair tickling Jesse’s cheek.

For a few minutes, they said nothing. Hanzo’s arms wrapped around him grounded him to the present but he couldn’t help but let his mind wander. Hand grasping the duvet, Jesse dragged it up to Hanzo’s chest then abandoned it in favor of holding onto the archer. Through it all, Hanzo petted his hair and whispered softly against the crown of his head, pressing light kisses there, peppering others around his temples. A part of Jesse never wanted this to end but reality had a way of crashing down even in the softest of moments. However, he couldn’t unwound himself from Hanzo, settling on resting his cheek against the other man’s shoulder, glaring absently at the nearest wall.

“Tryin’ isn’t always good enough, Han.”

Hanzo hummed, and Jesse immediately thought over the sentence, cursing his word choice. Trying is what Hanzo has been doing since he first came to the Watchpoint. What was he thinking saying something stupid like that? Floundering for the words, Hanzo speaks up before he has the chance to apologize.

“It is for me.”

Looking up at the archer, Jesse’s heart clenches when Hanzo meets his gaze unflinchingly.

“You are enough for me.”

One of the archer’s hands dislodges from his person and Jesse isn’t embarrassed to admit that he missed the contact as quickly as it vanished. A soft plush weight settles between them and Jesse glances down at the small dragon pressed against his chest, staring up at him with a stately gaze.

“For us.”

Jesse’s eyes snap up to meet Hanzo’s, and the latter smiles softly.

Lost for words, Jesse blows a puff of air and snorts indignantly, “How d’you know all the right things to say?”

“Fatherhood,” Hanzo says with a casual shrug,  “And I am not as socially inept as most would think.”

Jesse’s stifles his laughter against Hanzo’s shoulder. “You’re tellin’ me.”

The two lapse into a comfortable silence after a small fit of laughter, holding one another with unspoken words floating between them, though content enough to let sleeping dogs lie until it was time to wake them from slumber. After some time, the door cracked open and Jesse glanced over as a small head of messy black hair poked through. He knew he had to be making that face most adults did when faced with an adorable child, but it couldn’t be helped. Genji told him that Hayao reminded him of Hanzo when they were young. Except for the atrocious middle-part that both brothers shuddered to talk about.

Hayao’s dark hair fell to his shoulders, thick and messy, barely tameable with a comb and he barely came up to Jesse’s thigh. Face round and youthful, dark eyes wide with curiosity as he peered around the door. Jesse bites back a laugh when Hayao creeps into the room, his white pachimari t-shirt and checkered pajama pants a dead giveaway no matter how much ninja kid training he had. He steps carefully and quietly to Jesse’s side of the bed, and after a few unsuccessful attempts, manages to climb onto the bed, his small hands pressing against Jesse’s side as he leans over.

“Uncle Jesse,” he whispers, throwing a leg over Jesse’s side  and sitting down on his hip, gently patting his cheek. “ Uncle Jesse .”

Pretending to rouse from sleep with a soft huff, Jesse cracked open one eye and smiled, “Hey there partner.” Jesse shot a glance towards Hanzo who was apparently fast asleep with both eyes closed. Under his breath, Jesse muttered ‘traitor’ and swore that the corner of Hanzo’s lips twitched upwards even if it was just for a second.

“Did you have a nightmare, Uncle Jesse?”

Call Jesse McCree many things but he wasn’t a liar when it came to kids.

“Just a lil’ one, Howie, nothin’ to worry about.”

Hayao’s eyebrows furrow and Hanzo’s squeeze around his waist tells him that he said the wrong thing. The archer’s eyes crack open and he feigns waking by stretching and yawning loudly. Hayao’s attention immediately taken by the “waking” of his father, beaming as he clambers off Jesse to dive onto Hanzo. Jesse smiles, watching as Hanzo lifts his son up with his hands tucked under the boy’s arms.

“And how did you sneak in here, little one?”

“I got better at being quiet, dad. No one heard me, not even Uncle Jesse.”

Hanzo hummed and lowered his arms, tucking Hayao to his chest and kissing the top of his head, giving him a cuddle. Jesse was absolutely certain that if his heart wasn’t warm by then, it was positively melting now. Imposing and dangerous nature aside — Hanzo Shimada was no stranger to cuddling and was absolutely adorable with a child clinging to his front, the man talking to him lowly until the dragon plush catches Hayao’s eye and he relinquished his hold on his father to pick it up, holding it out to Jesse.

At a loss for words, and slightly embarrassed at being caught staring, Jesse asks awkwardly, “That for me, darlin’?”

“Mhm, Mugen won’t let the monsters get you,” Hayao says, leaning further out of Hanzo’s arms to lay it in Jesse’s hands. He briefly takes notice of Jesse’s missing arm but says nothing, instead squirming out of Hanzo’s hold in favor of Jesse’s.

“Monsters?”

It’s a balancing act trying to hold the plush and Hayao at the same time. In the end, Hanzo  helps by sitting the boy on Jesse’s lap with plush in hand, Hayao leaning back against the cowboy’s chest as his father tried to fix his sleep-ruffled hair into some semblance of order. After a bit, Hanzo gave up and huffed, Hayao laughing at his father’s feigned annoyance as the archer ruffled his hair making it even messier than it was before. Jesse smiled. Somehow it felt right — this felt right.

Hanzo with his hair loose and a wide smile on his face, making silly faces and slipping into his mother tongue, talking eagerly to his son who laughed and played along. Occasionally, the boy would look up at Jesse and grin, reminding him that he was part of this.

This moment.

You matter to us.

“Uncle Jesse?”

Snapping back to reality, Jesse didn’t notice when the playfulness stopped and both Hayao and Hanzo were watching him with concern. He sniffs and coughs lightly, wiping under his eyes.

“...Hey Howie, you remember how… a while back you uh… drew lil ol’ me a picture?”

Hayao tilted his head and looked to Hanzo. The archer whispered something low that Jesse couldn’t quite make out but Hayao seemed to understand. He looked back at Jesse and nodded.

“Mhm, did you like it?” A nervous twinge to his voice tugged at Jesse’s heartstrings.

Wrapping his arm around the boy’s waist, he nodded.

“Yeah, yeah.. I did. Course I did.”

There was no way he couldn’t. This between him and Hanzo was for the long haul it seemed and if he was going to be part of Hanzo’s life, he had to be a part of theirs. But with that came a sleugh of things he wasn’t ready to admit or face. What if he messed up? What if he hurt them? Hanzo would never talk to him again, and he had no idea how to be a father. Hardly had one of his own. It just felt like too tall of an order even for a cowboy that defied the odds time and time again.

But when Hayao looked at him, eyes alight with trust and cheer, it was hard to think of saying ‘no’ especially to a heartfelt request like that. After all, he wasn’t cruel enough to break a kid’s heart.

Clearing his throat, Jesse kept the boy’s gaze and floundered for the words,  “Listen uh… bein’ a dad it uhm… it takes a lot. It is a lot but if ya want… if it’s okay with your dad (His gaze flicked to Hanzo whose head bobbed in understanding or approval, either way it made Jesse pause and take a deep breath, exhaling before he continued) and your brother..… I’d.. like to be your dad.”

“Papa,” Hayao interrupted, voice soft.  “If you were dad, that’d be weird because we already have dad.”

Hayao nestled against Jesse’s chest, laying his small hands on Jesse’s forearm.

“Okay?” He asked, carefully. “Papa?”

Swallowing the tears and the fears that clogged his throat, Jesse nodded. From his peripheral, Hanzo smiled at him and he gave a shuddering sigh.

“If ya think I’m good enough…” Jesse nodded, laying a light kiss to the top of Hayao’s head, making him giggle and smile up at him.   “Then yeah, I’m your Pa.”

[mercurytail]

Split Instincts

This is a little McHanzo fic that is inspired by the recent RP I was graciously allowed to spectate by @iblackfeathers and @plucky-pomegranate . They were kind enough to let me run with this amazing prompt! I plan to just post small chapters here on tumblr. Once they are all out and finished I’ll link to AO3. ;) I’m thinking about writing in more character development and FEELS.~~ >u< But, I just couldn’t keep this to myself any longer. Enjoy!! @iblackfeathers also made some rough sketches of Dragon possessed Hanzo too! *permission to post granted by artist*

Synopsis: Hanzo is caught in an exploding facility while on a mission. Gravely wounded, he falls unconscious in the field and McCree and the others manage to get him back to base. The dragon’s sense his body’s struggle to stay alive and they know they have to do something. To help protect him while he is comatose the dragons take possession of his body and have a little fun whilst he is away.

tags: Pre-relationship, light angst, noodle dragons, McHanzo, future smut

^u^ Enjoy and PLEASE comment!! <3 I live for them!!

Hanzo is fatally wound, the whole left side of his chest is shredded and his lung is punctured and collapsed. He bleeds heavily, quickly losing consciousness. McCree finds him and calls for an emergency extraction. Tracer arrives and they escape under heavy gunfire. McCree is forced to Deadeye for the fifth time to ensure their safety. His eye vessels rupture and blood drips down his cheek. Genji helps him carry Hanzo on board the carrier.

McCree keeps watch over the other man closely. He tells himself it's because of the adrenaline and for Genji.

Angela and her staff are waiting when they land, they rush Hanzo to surgery. he flat lines on the table; three times. Each time Angela just barely brings him back. Finally, after a grueling eight hour invasive surgery he is stable and Angela moves him to an ICU unit and post a nurse outside the small room.

After receiving treatment himself, McCree waits for news on Hanzo. Hanzo is in critical condition. Everyone is denied access to his unit. All the team is allowed is the view from the Plexiglas window or visual update via Athena.

Hanzo lies near motionless, He could be mistaken as dead if not for the faint rise and fall of his chest. His face is marred by bandages, and dried blood. An oxygen tube extends from his throat and mouth.

An odd feeling blooms in McCree’s chest and he feels wetness in his eyes, in his confusion he shoves it away to the back of his mind and wipes away the tears.

He visits sparsely, once a day or so; trying not to arouse suspicion. After three days Angela bans him and everyone from the Unit. Hanzo was teetering on the brink of death and she only allowed authorized personnel in and around the room.

But his thoughts still wondered at night. “Athena.”

“Yes, Agent McCree?”

“Can you show me an update on Agent Shimada’s condition?”

“Yes.” A holoscreen appears in front of him as he raised up in bed. On it showed Hanzo still hooked up to many instruments. The eery beeping creeps to his ear. “Show me his vitals.” A second screen pops up, showing Hanzo’s heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and a few more.

A sense of dread builds up within him. He fisted his hand in the sheets and then curled into them on his side. “That's enough Athena, thank you.”

“Yes, Agent McCree,” the holoscreens disappear, “Have a good night.”

Listening to the silence, he then closes his eyes and forces himself to sleep.

It's a week before Hanzo shows significant improvement. The flush of his skin returns bit by bit, slowly his breathing becomes more stable and on day thirteen they remove his indo-tracheal tube and replace it with an oxygen mask.

Angela announces she will reopen the unit to visitors only once he is awake, but access to the room is off limits till then.

That night, just back from a small recon mission, McCree finds himself standing in front of the window looking down at the sleeping man. He is relieved to see Hanzo's progress. Though the amount of relief he feels he doesn’t wish to think on. His eyelids droop, It’d had been a stressful but uneventful mission and he was tired. it’s well past three in the morning and he's feeling the weight of his body. The ache in his bones seeps deeper. His knee joint is ablaze demanding reprieve. ‘Just a minute,’ he tells himself as he sits down in one of the waiting chairs across from the window.  ‘I'll rest and then head back.’ He closes his eyes still keeping them locked on the movement of Hanzo's chest.

***

‘Master you are dying. Please allow us to save you. We will give you our strength and carry you where you cannot. Give in to us. We will protect you.”

Floating in the black abyss, Hanzo feels cold and yet he also feels nothing at all, his finger tips burn in the icy black sludge. He is scared.

‘I don’t want to die.’

He gives in, ‘Do whatever you must, by any means necessary.’

Whatever had kept him aloft broke away and he dropped. As he falls one thing comes to his mind, ‘Jesse.’

Then he hits.

***

Hanzo shoots up in the bed. Its blindingly bright, the sterile white room bathed in the sun's morning light sears his eyes.

‘Run!’ He bolts from the bed, not knowing where to go. The machines shrill in a flurry of beeping as he breaks his tubes and wires to them.

‘Hide!’ His instincts scream at him. He screams. He crouches among the hanging curtains, hiding away against the corner of the tiny tiled room.

A door sliding open sounds and footsteps near. ‘FIGHT, HIDE, RUN’

He cries out an call of pure distress, confusion swirling in his head.

***

A nurse enters Hanzo’s room as per usual. But they find the bed empty, equipment tubes loose and machines beeping erratically. Panicked they are about to press the emergency call button when they hear a quiet hiss sound off in the dark corner of the room. They creep hesitantly toward the wall of curtains. A figure lashes out at them as they reveal its slumped form. The nurse runs screaming out of the room. Soon, Dr. Angela walks in. “Mr. Shimada!” she ducks as a obscure piece of medical equipment is thrown at her. “Call for Ana!!” she says to a nurse coming into the room behind her, “we may need to sedate him. ***

A loud crash shakes Mccree awake. He sits up in the chair, back cracking. The morning sun shines harsh on his sleep deprived face. Two nurses fly past him and barge into Hanzo’s room. He follows them with his gaze. They file in carefully as if trying not to startle something. His eyes cast across the room and there, in the corner of the room crouched like an animal is Hanzo. Torn wires and tubes hang from the man as he folds in on himself and hisses at the staff attempting to placate him.

McCree surges up pushing a nurse out of the way of the door and enters.

Slowly he approaches Hanzo. The man is crouched low to the floor, hissing around his oxygen mask, and lashing out at the nurse nearest him.

“Angela what’s going on?” He asks as he passes her.

“I don’t know! My tech says they found him like this. He is going to reopen his stitches if this continued!” She says with desperation in her voice.

McCree kneels closer to the crouched figure.

“Hanzo,” McCree edges closer and offers his hand.

Hanzo whips around and stares straight at him. Then without any warning Hanzo closes the distance.

He pulls himself into McCrees space and nuzzles softly into his neck. Shocked McCree lightly wraps his arms around the man and strokes his back from neck to hip. Humming softly.

Hanzo makes a sound akin to a purr, if that was even possible and curls into him. But still remains jumpy and vigilant of the others in the room.

After a long few minutes the nurse’s attempt again to return Hanzo to his bed. They are met with growls, and demands for them to leave. Ana then walks into the room. “What is wrong, I was called and it sounded urgent.” she asks Angela with worry evident in her tone.

“Hanzo is behaving manically. I fear he may hurt himself or someone else. I called you to assist with sedating him.” Angela turns to the two men, Hanzo growls toward them still clinging to McCree; giving no sign of backing down or complying.

Angela sighs, “He will not let anyone near him other than Agent McCree. I feel it is an extreme but if you could use one of your darts-” a blue streak startles her as she turns back toward Ana.

“All I needed was your verbal approval,” the wise old lady says as she tucks her dart pistol back into her coat lining. Angela turns to see McCree softly laying a swiftly collapsing Hanzo on the floor.

She motions to McCree to return Hanzo to his bed. McCree nods.

The door clicks shut after the two women make their exit and he looks down in his arms at the man now curled completely in half in his lap.

***

McCree sits cross legged on the floor laying Hanzo’s head against his thigh. He sees Hanzo fighting to stay awake. His eyes close and flash open. McCree strokes his hair comfortingly.

“Hanzo, Darlin’, How you feelin?” He asks as he sweeps a pieces of hair from Hanzo’s face.

“We are content,” Hanzo hums as he drifts off succumbing to his exhaustion and the serum.

“We?” Jesse just stares down at him, stroking his hand over the crown of his head.

[hiphipfrey]

McHanzo + injury? like bed rest or something sweet

It had been an incredible shot, no doubt about it.

True, Hanzo had come to learn of McCree’s ridiculous aiming skills, and of his quick reaction time as well. He was probably the only person that could keep up with Hanzo’s own record for sharp-shooting at the range on base, and that itself was enough to earn his respect in battle.

But this was something else entirely.

The ringing in his ears from the gunshot began to subside as McCree relaxed the iron grip around his shoulders and pulled away.

“Missed one.” He mumbled before slouching against the wall again. Gritting his teeth, McCree winced loudly as he put a hand to his bloodied side. “Fuuuck, that hurt.”

Hanzo didn’t move from his spot on the ground, only staring at the body of the Talon agent lying in a crumbled heap behind them. He hadn’t barely heard their footsteps coming down the alleyway before McCree had yanked him close and fired his gun just beyond Hanzo’s head.

In the time it would have taken him to pull out his bow, aim, and fire a bolt, Jesse McCree had already saved Hanzo’s life.

Remembering where they were, Hanzo shook his head and placed his hands back against McCree’s side with renewed vigor.

Something, he had to say something. One doesn’t just have someone save their life and then not say anything in return. But no matter how he tried, nothing would leave his lips. Hanzo knew a simple ‘thanks’ wouldn’t cut it; after all, he had seen McCree save others before and then turn down displays of gratitude, claiming he was ‘just doing his job, nothing more’.

He felt McCree shift under his hand suddenly and then hiss in pain. Hanzo sighed, grabbing the gauze from the first-aid kit. “Hold still.”

“M’tryin’.”

“Try harder.”

McCree grumbled, but eventually settled back against the wall with a huff. When it seemed like he would not squirm any further, Hanzo began to bandage up McCree’s side. The gash across his hip was mostly superficial and a majority of the bleeding had stopped already, making dressing the wound easy. However, he could feel the gunslinger’s eyes following his every movement the entire time, and that alone unnerved him like no other.

When it became too much, Hanzo knew he had to say something. “...I thought I had cleared this area, I apologize.”

“You ain’t done nothin’ wrong, Han.” McCree laughed dryly. “That’s Talon for ya. Think you get rid of ‘em all an’ they just keep comin’ back.”

He ignored the way his mind clung to that nickname, and pressed on. “You still pushed yourself, despite your injury, because of my carelessness and inattention to detail. At least let me apologize for that.”

“No can do.” Again, McCree chuckled with a shake of his head. “That ain’t how I roll, archer. If someone’s got a gun to their head, I ain’t ‘bout’a just walk away from that. Metaphorically speakin’, I mean.”

Hanzo finished with his work, and curled his hands back against his thighs. “That logic will sooner get yourself killed if you aren’t careful.”

“Well, then,” McCree smiled a wide grin that Hanzo is sure he will remember for a long, long time. “S’good thing I got good friends like you to patch me up, ain’t it?”

[solivar]

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

Hanzo Shimada is an expatriate student of the Fine Arts, attending college in what he assumes to be a reasonably sedate corner of the American southwest. Jesse McCree is an occasionally leather-clad NPS ranger whose duties extend somewhat further than shooing lost tourists back onto the clearly marked hiking trails. Something weird is going on in the desert south of Santa Fe and their lives unexpectedly come together in the middle of it.

In which Hanzo and Jesse continue to have a conversation and Hanzo receives an (un)expected message from home.

Calling it a cave was lending it a dignity it absolutely did not deserve but the alternative -- a crack, barely deep enough to hold both him and the little pack he carried simultaneously -- was the sort of defeatist thinking that Pop Pop Nate would have frowned upon pretty strenuously. It was, however, not really a cave and, as far as shelters went, it left plenty of things to be desired: it wasn’t big enough to stand up in and so he had to shove his pack in first and then crawl in after it, scrambling all the way across an unevenly angled floor covered in sand and sharp bits of stone that were destined to become lodged in places nobody ever wanted to have a pointy rock poking them. On the plus side, with the sun almost down, the entrance was already fully in shadow and it was only dumb luck that he’d spotted it himself, mostly concealed as it was behind a mass of tangled half-grown mesquite poking up through a drift of scree that might rattle as he walked on it but wouldn’t take a print no matter how heavy footed he was scrambling up. It was even a little bit warmer inside than out, the rising wind hissing through the mesquite branches but breaking around the entrance to his hidey hole so that only the barest lick of it reached him, tasting like snow, like ice.

NWS had been forecasting the possibility when he left the cabin and he didn’t quite dare bring out his little handheld to check the current weather, in case his pursuer had some means of tracking him that partook of triangulating comm signals, which was not beyond the bounds of reality. He likewise didn’t yet dare to bring out the package of nutrient-dense snack bars he’d stashed in his pack before leaving or wiggle the survival blanket out of the first aid kit, because opening up either one would make noise that could carry for miles and he had no practical idea how close or far away his pursuer might be. He’d lost sight of him once he’d scrambled down off the ridgeline himself and into the maze of defiles marking the edge of the valley, looking for someplace to take cover as darkness approached and the temperature dropped and the skies slowly clouded over. The last glimpse he’d had was Marcus silhouetted against the sky, rifle not quite leveled, as he’d scrambled behind a screen of brush and jumbled stone, the best part of an hour ago.

In the best part of another hour, it would be fully dark and then he would have a choice to make: hunker down in this little hole for the night and hope he didn’t freeze, even with the survival blanket, because he didn’t dare start a fire, or try to make his way back home under cover of night and hope that he didn’t leave a trail clear enough to follow back to his own doorstep or break an ankle in the dark or be caught out in the open with nowhere to run or hide. A thread of cold air found its way down his back, sliding over the collar of his jacket, and he tucked his legs closer to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, admitted that none of his choices were good.

From above, a loose stone clattered down the face of the rise to land somewhere to the right of his little hole. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep the fear-driven sound he felt crawling up his throat from escaping, along with his adrenaline-spiked heart, ricocheting around inside his ribcage as though it intended to flee completely independent of the rest of him.

Calm down. Calm down. It’s just a coyote out hunting or a squirrel headed back to its den. He forced himself to lower his hands, to breathe slowly, evenly, in through the nose, out through the mouth, to minimize the sound of it. Calm down calm down calm

“I know you’re here, Jesse.” Marcus Whitehawk’s voice drifted down from above.

Jesse’s hands found their way back over his mouth again.

“I know you can hear me.” Another rock, and then a few more, a steady trickle of sand, and now he could hear the scrape of hard boot soles against stone. “Come out now, stop running, and I’ll make it quick.”

Calm down calm down calm down. It was all he could do to not let the panic trying to claw its way out of his chest take over the pace of his breathing, permit little noises of distress to pass his lips. He can’t see you, he doesn’t know where you are, if he did he wouldn’t be trying to flush you, calm down.

“I’ll find you, one way or another.” The footsteps and the regular tumble of stone came to a halt. “Hard and slow or fast and painless, the choice is yours, Jesse.”

He buried his face in his knees, squeezed his eyes closed on the tears trying to well up, shook silently. After a moment, the footsteps continued on.

Can’t stay here. The thought crawled out of the panicked circles his brain was running in, the first coherent one in the minutes after. He’s going to circle down this way eventually, and when he does, he’ll -- He took a ragged, desperate breath, too loud. Wait till it’s a little more dark.

He inched closer to the entrance of his hiding place, and watched as the sky faded from dusky gold to vivid crimson-purple to the deep lingering blue of winter twilight, just enough light left to see the floor of the valley, still some distance below his own perch, enough to let him make his way down with only a little risk of falling or setting off an avalanche of scree himself. If he left. Right now.

It took him an unpardonably long time to actually reach back and gather up his pack, to ease himself out of the hidey hole legs first, crawl along under the mesquite bushes with excruciating slowness to avoid knocking any rocks askew -- well, okay, not too many rocks, because it was impossible to avoid at all and definitely harder in the near-dark. He kept himself tucked low to the ground once he passed beyond their dubious shelter, making himself as small as he could, just a part of the background clutter, the flesh between his shoulderblades crawling furiously with every step he took in the open.

Just keep going -- get to the valley floor and it’ll be easier to move, easier to run, you can take the long way around to the cabin and he might not even --

He heard the shot before he felt it -- a single sharp report, its echoes bouncing off a thousand surfaces -- and then he was falling, knocked off his feet, bouncing off loose masses of stone and stunted shrubs, coming to rest flat on his back at the base of the rise. His pack came off somewhere above, and he’d left most of his breath behind on the ride down, and his lungs seemed deeply disinclined to help catch it back, full of something too thick to inhale around. He coughed hard, spat blood, and the pain lanced through his chest at last, finding its way around shock, and his head spun, hot and throbbing. He should, he knew, try to get up, try to run, try to do something, anything, but he couldn’t breathe.

From an impossibly vast distance, he heard someone sliding down the decline. It took all his strength to lift his head, to force his eyes to focus, Marcus striding toward him, and he felt it, felt it like he hadn’t in years, roaring up inside him with the blood bubbling in his throat, in his lungs, throbbing in his temples and in his gut: hunger. Hunger sharp and hard and hot, clawing at his insides, thrashing in his veins and flesh and soul. He dragged in a painful, rattling breath and croaked, “Stay...back. Please..stay…”

He coughed again, and the taste of his own blood in his mouth, on his tongue, on his teeth, made everything worse, sharper and harder and hotter, like throwing kerosene on a fire made of twisted metal and broken glass. It roared in him, that hunger, split his gums and the tips of his fingers, didn’t care that he had a monster-killing bullet in his chest, wanted to rip and rend and tear and Marcus was not fucking stopping.

“Please,” It came out warped and twisted, around his new teeth and new tongue, the straining of his jaw, but if his not-cousin heard the difference he made no sign of it. “Stay --”

“Don’t move.” A foot came down on his chest, pinned him back to the hardpack, sent a bolt of pain through him that, for an instant, briefly eclipsed all else. The cold barrel of the rifle rested against his forehead. “I told you. You shouldn’t have run.”

Please, he wanted to say, but the pain tightening his chest, the blood boiling up his throat wouldn’t allow it. Please get back, I don’t want

He heard the rifle’s action work, heard the cartridge slide into place, heard the bolt click home. Smelled gun oil and powder and the blood pulsing in Marcus’ veins, the warmth of his flesh, the taste of his breath, and the hunger inside him rose up and roared. Distantly, he heard someone screaming. He thought, for a moment, before the world slid away into darkness, that it might be himself.

When Jesse opened his eyes, it was snowing. It was snowing and the wind was blowing hard out of the north and the icy kiss of it was scorching his face and hands, cutting through his wet clothing where it clung stickily to his body. His lashes clung together as he blinked, eyes blurry, spit thick, mouth tasting of iron and salt and something else he couldn’t quite identify. His eyes refused to blink clear and so he scrubbed at his face with the sleeve of his jacket, tacky-damp, and he finally recognized what he was tasting, the smell on the air that wasn’t snow.

Blood.

A lot of blood. In fact, he realized as his vision cleared and his head stopped revolving in slow, steady circles, that there wasn’t much left of Marcus but the muddy, slushy puddle a good bit of his blood had made. Jesse knelt at the edge of it, the knees of his jeans soaked through, sleeves of his jacket wet to the elbows, his hands still not quite right. A shred of flannel that had probably already been red poked out of the mess and there draped over one of the bigger rocks was a strip of skin with some lengths of long dark hair still attached and a couple little knobs of bone, meticulously scraped clean of flesh but too tough to bite through, scattered like dice on a kitchen table. He could feel the effort it had taken to do the scraping in the muscles of his jaw, in his teeth, and he curled around himself, wanted to be sick, wanted to heave up everything he’d just swallowed down, but his body absolutely refused to even consider the idea, smugly full and happy about it, lungs clear, pain gone. He squeezed his eyes closed and whispered prayers to every god and spirit and ancestor he could think of who might take the littlest trace of pity on him and make this not to have happened. When he opened them again, no god or spirit or ancestor had chosen to answer.

Get up, a little voice that might have been sanity or might have been something else whispered in the back of his mind. Get up you have to get up what if he wasn’t alone? What if there’s more of them out there and they find you here and they see this and

He found he didn’t care at all that there might be more and that they might find him and that they might see what he’d done. What followed after would only be just.

Get up, that little voice whispered again, go home, go back to the cabin, wash off, burn the clothes, call Gabe and Jack, tell them

And even the little voice flinched away from that. From telling them that. That he’d killed, that he’d eaten, that he’d failed them, that he’d betrayed everything they’d ever taught him and every word he’d sworn to them and everything he’d promised he’d be and that he wouldn’t do. That thought, of how ashamed and disappointed they would be, was what brought him to his feet, finally put a churning twist in his gut.

I can’t go back. The thought made itself heard and he knew it was true. There was no way he could go back to that little cabin, that safe and comfortable place that his grandparents had made, not now, not like this, with the blood of an innocent man drying on under his nails and his stomach still full of his meat. He could never go there again, because he wasn’t the person he’d been when he left -- he was something less now, and worse, and he turned away and walked north into the desert, into the hills, the cutting cold of the wind biting nowhere deep enough.

He walked for hours -- he had no idea how many, had no idea of how long any of what he’d done had taken, and found he didn’t care. The cold sank into him, and the dark, and he felt them only distantly, the snow freezing in his hair and the tears on his cheeks. He walked until the sky in the east grew slowly lighter, even behind the clouds, the dark fading from black to deepest blue and the sun finally rising sick and smeared and bloody on the horizon, casting deep shadows across the desert.

At his feet, a canyon yawned -- if he’d gone a few more feet in the dark, he’d have walked off the edge without ever seeing it, and the smile that curled his mouth and split his lips was bitter. He came to that edge now and looked down, down the striated and rust-red walls to the bottom, still deep in shadow -- jagged shadows, sharp and gnashing, like the hungry jaws of a starving beast.

It was, he thought, weary, sick, a long way down. Maybe long enough. He took a deep, searing cold breath, and turned. To the south, the wind was tearing the clouds apart, the last of the brightest stars just blinking out. He released his breath and let himself fall.

*

Hanzo opened his eyes with his gut and chest and head still full of the swooping, sickening, plunging sensation of falling to the comforting sight of the ranger’s carved and brightly painted bedroom ceiling. The relief this occasioned persisted for the whole three seconds it took for him to register that he was, in fact, falling. He hit the ranger’s likewise wooden floor with a force only slightly blunted by his state of partial mummification in a mass of sheets and blankets and comforter, landing with a thud and a stream of Japanglish invective that would have done Genji proud as he cracked his elbow, his shoulder, and his head more or less in sequence.

He lay there for a long moment afterwards, staring up at the dimly lit and now somewhat further away ceiling, lacking the energy or the ambition necessary to even consider moving. In the dark behind his eyes, he could still feel the sticky itch of blood drying on skin that wasn’t his own, the sick satisfaction of a belly full of something too awful to contemplate, and the echo, still ringing in his own bones, of finding the ground after a long fall. It occurred to him, as he lay there and the light coming through the seams in the shutters grew gradually brighter, that he hadn’t fallen off his side of the bed -- the kiva was on his side of the bed, and he was staring at the lowest part of the windows and the spot the ranger’s boots still occupied and chair that he couldn’t remember seeing before. He had rolled off the ranger’s side of the bed, and he hauled himself up with a groan and a few more enthusiastic Genjiisms to find that said bed was, in fact, empty of its other occupant, and most of the bedclothes were wrapped around him and the sheer intensity of the panic that galloped through him at that realization was the sort of thing that the better class of neo-country-western singers wrote lugubrious ballads about. He could practically hear the chorus as he extricated himself from the tangle of both the top and bottom sheets: my ranger’s gone, he’s run away, I can’t find him, night or day, I love him so, I want him back, something something probably involving a trusty pickup or possibly a dog named Blue.

The kitchen was empty: no dishes in the sink or in the dish drainer, no coffee in the coffee pot, the kettle cold. Even worse: nobody in the sitting room. The blankets Hana used the night before were neatly folded on the couch, pillows piled on top. No enormous green dog occupied the floor in front of the fireplace, nor did anyone’s terrifying smoke Dad keep residence in any of the chairs along with an unknown but deeply disturbing number of half-finished and potentially non-Euclidian knitting projects. The space in front of the house, previously containing a tragic welding accident in the vague shape of a WinneUFO, was likewise void, though tire tracks in the dusty road suggested the direction of its coming and going. His own phone and tablet still sat on the coffee table, charge cords reading green, and he snatched the cell up, rewarded with actual bars of connection. He drifted back into the kitchen as he thumbed it open and speed-dialed Genji’s number.

“Hey, Hanzo.” The voice that answered was not his brother’s but Hana’s and his knees went stupidly weak enough with relief that he had to lean on the counter to stay upright. “Have a good night’s rest?”

“Where are you?” He demanded by way of answer. “Where’s everybody, Jesse wasn’t in bed when I woke up, what’s --”

“Easy, easy. Calm down. I left a note. Didn’t you see it?” She did not sound the slightest bit worried, or contrite, a fact he found rather significantly nettlesome.

“Hana. Never, in the entire history of time, has telling someone to calm down ever succeeded in calming them down.” Hanzo replied, tensely, scanning the counters, the prep island, the cupboards, and finally coming to rest on the refrigerator, where a magnetic note board hung in plain view bearing the words: Went up to the hacienda for waffles. Join us when you wake up. We’ll save at least two pieces of bacon. H. “I see it now. Is Jesse with you?”

“No.” An expressive noise just slightly too feminine to be a genuine snort. “And between you and me I really doubt that Ranger McThoughtful would leave you by yourself after all the crap we’ve been through in the last seventy-two hours. Have you checked outside?”

“Not yet.” He peered out the kitchen window and found the junipers dancing gently in the breeze with a little dust devil, but no ranger in immediate view. “I just woke up a few minutes ago, I had a weird --” dream not a dream that wasn’t a dream that was too real that was something that happened that happened to him “-- dream, I fell out of bed and that’s when I realized he was gone and --” Hana giggled. “What exactly is so funny?”

“You.” Hana replied, amusement evident. “Seriously, take a breath. Have you looked --”

“Hanzo?” The voice came from behind and to the right, the corridor that led to the bedroom -- and also the bathroom. Where he had not, in fact, even thought to look. Because he was an idiot.

Hanzo turned and there he stood.

There he stood, with a deeply concerned look on his face, a little worry-mark engraved between his perfect brows, his beard obviously freshly trimmed and combed.

There he stood, with a towel draped around his shoulders, catching the drops of water dripping off his still-damp brown ringlets, runnels of which were still rolling down his chest, spangling the curls there like tiny, exquisite diamonds, trailing over the ridged muscles of his belly.

There he stood, with a second towel wrapped around his trim waist, knotted in place on one hip, the full length of one muscular thigh thus exposed, tawny skin gleaming wetly in the indirect light coming through the kitchen windows.

There he stood and were those fuzzy jackalope slippers? They were. Fuzzy jackalope slippers. Somehow that brought the entire look together.

Hanzo took a deep breath, said, “Never mind, I found him” and hung up. Before the call disconnected, he heard Hana cackling shamelessly. He was going to have to have a word with that woman.

“Hanzo.” The ranger -- oh for fuck’s sake, you’ve slept in the same bed with him TWICE now, just call him by his NAME -- was looking at him now with open and serious alarm, as though he were afraid one wrong move would send him jumping out the kitchen window and he would have laughed it he weren’t fairly sure it would come out sounding half-crazed. “Are you okay, darlin’? You look a little --”

He crossed the room in three strides and, before he could let any of the million immediately occurring reasons not to do it avail themselves of control, threw his arms around him and clutched him tight, trying hard not to shake too obviously. For a second, the ranger stood absolutely stock startled still -- stiff, not knowing what to do with his hands, breath catching under his ear and heartbeat tripping noticeably higher -- and then the tension melted, arms closed around him in return, a hand coming to rest in the loose mess of hair at the back of his neck.

“Easy,” Jesse’s voice was a lower, rougher than usual. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” A callused hand stroked his neck, the shorter hair on the back of his head. “What was it, darlin’? Bad dream?”

No. “Something like that.” He took a deep breath, filled his lungs and head with the scent of sage-cedar-spice, stronger even than usual, his own hand resting spread on Jesse’s back. Jesse’s mostly-bare, still a little wet back, firm muscle and mostly smooth, warm skin and all of the blood immediately tried to evacuate his head, a whole-body shiver running from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes.

“Must have been a real bad one.” His ranger murmured against his ear, the hitch still in his breath, warm against his skin, and Hanzo was intensely conscious of Jesse’s hand resting against the small of his back, still tangled in his hair. “You’re shakin’ all over. Maybe we should --”

“Jesse.” Hanzo’s gently questing hand came to rest on a not-smooth patch, smaller than he thought it would be, just under Jesse’s right shoulder blade. “I dreamt of you.”

“...Me?” And suddenly all his warm soothing calm was gone, every inch of his body tensing, including his voice. “What -- what did you --”

“I dreamt that you were afraid.” Hanzo said and found he didn’t quite have the courage necessary to turn and watch his face as he spoke -- especially since doing so meant stepping back, letting him go, even a little. “I dreamt you were running, hunted and afraid and alone.” He stopped, his mouth suddenly, painfully dry. “Hurt.”

Jesse’s skin pebbled with gooseflesh under his hands and now it was his turn to shiver.

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?” Hanzo whispered against his ranger’s neck. “It was real.”

Silence. Jesse’s hands slid out of his hair and the small of his back, came to rest on his hips, lightly, as though he were afraid to hold on too tightly. When he finally spoke, his voice was a toneless rasp. “Yes. It was -- that was real.” A ragged breath. “You...saw. What happened.”

“Yes.” Hanzo closed his arms tight, clung to his shoulders as he tried to pull away. “Jesse. Stop. Please. It wasn’t your fault!”

He did, at least, stop trying to push him away, though he suspected it was more out of surprise than any real desire to do so. “Of course it was my fault. I was scared and hurt and I lost control and I --” His voice cracked, his grip tightened, almost painfully. “You saw what I did.”

“You defended yourself. In the alternate reality where I live, when someone shoots you in the back from ambush? It’s called attempted murder.” Hanzo replied, fiercely, and now he did pull back, reached up and caught Jesse’s face in his hands -- his eyes were bright with unshed tears, the pain and grief and regret etched in every line. “You’re allowed to not let someone kill you, no matter how justified they might think they are. Gods and dragons, Jesse, you were a child -- a child who just lost his family -- you didn’t deserve that.”

“Neither did he.” Jesse took hold of his wrists and gently pulled his hands away, turned back toward the hallway, his shoulders hunched as though he were still expecting a blow.   

“Do you dream of that often?” Hanzo asked and Jesse froze in the door arch, his arms closing around himself.

“Not as often as I used to.” Roughly. “Let me get dressed and...we’ll talk.”

Hanzo stood unmoving in the middle of the kitchen, his heart thrumming like a struck harpstring, peace as far from his breathing as it was physically possible to be, his thoughts chasing themselves in a series of concentric circles that started with he thinks he deserved it HOW CAN HE THINK HE DESERVED IT and ended with he was standing right in front of you in nothing but a towel YOU COULD HAVE WORKED WITH THAT YOU IDIOT. Finally, after a short eternity of internal gridlock, his quivering knees allowed him to move and his ropy leg muscles allowed him to walk and he leaned over the back of the world’s most comfortable couch, grabbed one of the pillows Hana had used the night before, and screamed into until he felt like he could face Jesse again without screaming considerably more. Then he went and fetched the tea canister labeled To Enhance Calm, measured a potful into the strainer, and put the kettle on to boil, because there was little else he could do at that point except text-freak at Genji and that way lay madness.

He was applying the not-quite-boiling water to the teapot when Jesse padded back out into the kitchen in his stocking feet, this time mostly dressed in NPS green-and-black,  hair combed back in a reasonable approximation of tamed, and all the blood that had nearly returned to the parts of his circulatory system that needed it most immediately abandoned duty again. Stupid sexy ranger. Stupid sexy ranger uniforms.

“Thank you, Hanzo.” His ranger replied with grave courtesy as Hanzo poured him a mug, filling the air with steam intensely perfumed in desperately attempting to invoke serenity.

“You’re welcome.” He poured his own tea and a few moments transpired silently in the passing and application of honey and lemon. “Hana and the others have gone to the hacienda for breakfast. We should probably join them before they come looking for us.”

“We will. There’s just some things we need to talk over first.” Jesse, he could not help but notice, did not even pretend to drink. “I heard what you said last night. When you came to lay down.”

Hanzo froze with his teacup halfway to his mouth and, very carefully, set it back down before the sudden, violent contortions of his heart communicated themselves through his limbs and gave them both a sugary, tannic shower. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” It came out rough and he looked away and then back, the worry-mark between his brows taking up residence again. “Let’s...not do this right here?”

“Living room?” Hanzo suggested. “Next to the fireplace? I mean, there’s no fire but --”

“That’s good.” The look that crossed his face could not be described as a smile by even the loosest definition of the term, but it wasn’t quite anything else, either, and his stomach decided that was all the encouragement it required to get into the sudden, violent contortions action.

They took their tea and Hanzo the lead, inhaling peace and exhaling stress all the way, the chair he’d sat in the night before still draped in blankets, and he wordlessly offered Jesse a cushion, which he accepted with a level of grave solemnity that nearly sent him into giggles again. Maniacal, probably pretty hysterical giggles. He bit his lip, sat down, took a sip of tea to steady his nerves. “So...what happened?”

“That’s not what I --” Jesse regarded him steadily for a moment, dark eyes unreadable. “You’re not gonna let this go, are you?”

“No.” Hanzo assured him calmly and took another sip of his tea, since that seemed to be imparting an amazing amount of courage to go along with the serenity. Perhaps it was the serenity of having no fucks left to give? He’d have to ask Ana.

“Okay, all right -- I guess that...wasn’t the sorta thing you can experience without deservin’ an explanation.” And now he finally took a gulp of his own tea. “It took a couple days to make it to the cabin -- Maritza didn’t know where it was, which was a saving grace, because the hunters she called up to help were mostly looking for me in the wrong places. I suspect she thought I’d go to town, try to find some way out from there, but I...didn’t really want to leave. I just wanted someplace to hide.” A wry smile curled his mouth and reached his dark eyes. “And once I got there, I didn’t leave for weeks and weeks. Lived off the MREs and liquid nutrient stuff Yanaba and I carted up there that spring. Didn’t light up the wood burner unless it was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers inside.”

“That sounds like the sort of fun that isn’t.” Hanzo wound his fingers together, the better to resist the urge to scoot closer and grab his hands, restlessly rolling the half-empty mug between his palms.

“I’ve had better campin’ trips.” Jesse’s tone was dry and the smile faded off his face. “I messaged Jack and Gabe to let them know the ranch wasn’t safe t’go back to and that I was hunkered down at the cabin. They contacted me back and we developed a check-in regimen, once every two days, and they were going to extract themselves from the mess they were presently in and come get me as soon as they could.” A soft chuckle that contained not a trace of humor. “But I was restless. Bored. Outta clean underwear. I hiked into town for a shopping trip and that’s where Marcus saw me. Saw me and chased me.”

And shot you in the back and tried to kill you. Hanzo held onto that with all his might and now he did slide close, close enough to touch if necessary.

“I don’t remember a whole lot...after that.” He finished his tea in a single swallow and set the mug aside. “It was just after New Years when it happened. I woke up in the university hospital the best part of two years later.”

“Two...years?” Hanzo put his own cup down before the tremors in his hands sent it and the contents all over the floor. “How…?”

“Not sure. Probably won’t ever really be sure.” He looked away but couldn’t find anything he wanted to leave his gaze on and looked back. “Last thing I really remember is falling. Gabe and Jack came running when I stopped checking in and, per them, they found me chained up more dead than alive in the basement of some old artist colony out on the lip of Deadlock Gorge.”

Ice dripped the length of Hanzo’s spine and he couldn’t fight off the urge to shiver. “I...I think I remember seeing something about that. Somewhere.”

“Some nosy-ass reporter wrote a retrospective, got a lot of play awhile back. Massacre In Deadlock Gorge.” This time the wry smile barely qualified for either designation. “Not really much of a massacre in the traditional sense of the term, since there weren’t any bodies just empty buildings where the students and staff shoulda been and me, in a room so hard-warded that Gabe couldn’t get past the door and filled with so much cold iron that Jack couldn’t open the the manacles, much less the bars of the cage. Fortunately, somebody’d called 911 when whatever happened started goin’ down and the EMTs had no such trouble --”

“A cage.” Hanzo said, in what he hoped was a calm, neutral, even tone.

It apparently was not for Jesse froze in place, eyes wide and somewhat alarmed. “Uh. Yeah. I’m not sure --”

“A cage.” Hanzo reiterated as a pure, cold rage blossomed within him and that probably had something to do with the alarm spreading across Jesse’s face.

“Yeah -- a cage. Not sure I can blame them for that, either. They...well, somebody there seemed to know what they were dealing with --”

“A fourteen year old. An injured fourteen year old. That is what they were dealing with, Jesse.” It came out significantly louder than he intended, loud enough to echo off the walls and down the hall and ring in every corner.

“An injured, unconscious naayéé.” Jesse replied, actually calm and even, though his knuckles were white around the arms of the chair he sat in. “Whoever it was that found me, they knew -- knew how to bind me and keep me bound and how to keep others from stumbling over me by accident. Or at least that’s what Rein took from examining the ward structure, after the fact. They were --”

“Protecting you? Protecting other people from you?” Hanzo asked, voice tight, as that pure, cold rage began sprouting runners and trying to find its way past his ribcage. “I might accept that as an at least comprehensible explanation for keeping you in a fucking cage.”

“No.” Softly. “Nothin’ as reasonable as that. Best guess? They wanted me for my blood. For the power in it.”

Blood was starting to do dangerous, high-pressure things to the inside of Hanzo’s skull, as well, certain significant portions of his circulatory system, and his vision, which was washing red around the edges. He could not, thereafter, place the precise moment when he rose to his feet, his head and his heart both pounding with a fury so intense he could feel it filling his lungs with a heat brighter and fiercer than fire, could taste it on his tongue like lightning, his teeth aching in his jaw to lengthen into fangs, his fingers flexing as though claws slept inside them, both to rend whatever dared to do such things to his rescuer, his ranger, his mate, whose hands were closed around his shoulders, holding tight, and whose voice, low and dark and frantic, was trying to fill his ears.

“Hanzo. Hanzo. It’s okay -- it’s okay, it was a long time ago. Come back to me, darlin’.” A hand shifted from his shoulder to sink into his hair, to cradle the back of his skull, to make him meet the ranger’s dark eyes, catching and holding. “Breathe.”

That seemed a reasonable enough request, coming as it did from those lips, and so he obeyed it, breathed in deep, filled his lungs with his ranger’s scent, permitted it to soothe him, to ease the violence thrashing in his veins, to cool his fury. “I,” His voice sounded strange in his own ears, rough and dark. “Think you are entirely too accepting of being kept in a cage.”

“Like I said,” The ranger’s hands reached up to cradle his face, “It was a long time ago. Not much to do but get over it.”

“If you insist.” Hanzo took a second, deeper breath, Jesse’s scent filling his head like a living thing, sage and cedar and spice, warm skin and blood pulsing just beneath it. “I will be angry enough for both of us.”

“Okay.” His ranger took an unsteady breath of his own. “Can we talk about that other thing now?”

“Certainly.” Hanzo replied and his hands found their solid, meant-to-rest-there places on Jesse’s hips again.

“Okay.” Jesse said, again, and breathed a little more, dark eyes darting around as though they wanted to rest anywhere but his face and kept being dragged back, very much against their will. The warm, callused hands drifted down his neck to rest on his shoulders and, surrendering to the inevitable, he allowed their gazes to come back into contact. “I’m...not sure where to start.”

“Do you want me to…?” Hanzo half-asked, his mouth trying hard to go dry.

“No. No, I --” The corners of his ranger’s mouth were fighting a mighty struggle with some complicated tangle of emotions, battered up and down by repeated internal blows. “I should be sayin’ a lot of different things to put you off right now. I shouldn’t be encouraging this at all. The bond between us -- it’s messin’ with your head, with your emotions, compromisin’ your judgment and mine and --”

“Of course it is,” Hanzo breathed, comfortingly. “How could it not? Our souls are tied together.”

“Yes. Right. You understand. I’m glad --” Jesse sounded almost relieved.

“Yes, I do understand. I understand how lonely you are -- how lonely you’ve been for years -- how much you need someone in your life who can see you for everything you are and not turn away.” Hanzo replied and leaned closer. “Am I wrong?”

Jesse was silent for a long moment, the look in his eyes wild with barely repressed emotion, holding the corners of his mouth flat and steady with desperate effort. “No...no, you’re not. And you’ve been lonely, too, but darlin’ you’re -- you’ve got a thousand years of history behind you and I’m nobody from nowhere. This is all I’ve got to offer you and this job, the work I do, ain’t ever going to anything but freaky and dangerous and you deserve better than this.” Softly. “You’ve already given so much, darlin’. I just want you to be safe and happy.”

“I would give all of those years for this and you.” Hanzo erased the last of the physical distance between them, Jesse’s hands sliding down to rest on his back, fingers spread wide. “And you are not ‘nobody.’ You’re an actual fucking hero, Jesse McCree, and you should at least try to remember it.”

“We’ve only known each other for nine days.” Jesse leaned in, pressed their foreheads together, closed his eyes.

“During which you’ve saved my soul and my life a minimum of three times. That’s like an average of once every two and a half days. In some places, that implies a strong personal interest verging on commitment.” Hanzo whispered. “Look at me.”

Jesse sighed against his lips and opened his eyes. “I think I’m fallin’ in love with you, too.”

“Good. Because I’d hate to be alone in that.” His heart and his stomach, in rare accord, both fluttered simultaneously and then settled down because nothing good could come of nervous horking in the aftermath of such a confession. “Kiss me?”

“Gods, yes.”

It was not a chaste kiss. Nor was it only one. Jesse, for someone who lived alone in a cabin on the left asscheek of nowhere and whom had had, by his own admission, no serious relationships of a romantic nature possessed surprisingly well-developed out-making skills. Skills that caused all of the blood in Hanzo’s head and at least sixty percent of the rest of his body to rush urgently southward, so hard it made him a little lightheaded. Or that might have been oxygen deprivation combined with the taste of Jesse’s mouth. Or possibly the sensation of Jesse’s knee sliding between his thighs as they backed toward the world’s most comfortable couch. It most definitely had something to do with Jesse’s hands sliding under his tee-shirt and stroking hungrily over his belly, his sides, his back. Horizontality on some preferably soft surface was rapidly becoming necessary, before his ability to think coherent thoughts disappeared entirely into a lust-colored haze and extensive moaning of endearments in at least three languages.

At the very instant his back hit the world’s most comfortable couch cushions and Jesse’s warm, cedar-spice-sage scented weight settled atop him, between his thighs, the incoming message tone sounded on his tablet and he found himself, contrary to sanity, contrary to the numerous urgent demands of his body for more of this right now all the more of this, he lifted his head and gasped out, “Wait.”

“Wait?” Jesse asked, looking up from the task of applying an unmistakable for anything but it was lovebite to his clavicle.

“Wait.” Hanzo pleaded. “Just one second. This might be the information I was waiting for from home. If it is, we can celebrate.”

“Okay. Okay. I can wait. This is important.” Jesse agreed and sat up enough to allow Hanzo to wriggle an arm free and swipe his tablet off the coffee table and thumb the screen open.

It took him a moment to fully process what he was looking at once he did finally get his email open, distracted by Jesse pressing a series of warm, faintly wet kisses around his belly button. Then he began to laugh, and laugh, and laugh until Jesse, alarmed by the edges his laughter was growing, sat up and took him in his arms and asked, softly and urgently, “What is it, darlin’? What’s wrong?”

“Well,” Hanzo said, from around the painful, spiky obstruction in his throat, “I believe I can say with some certainty that I am no longer burdened by a thousand years of family history.”

*

[kiryuva]

Could you do a SFW thing with Hanzo cuddling his s/o? They're on the couch and S/O wants to watch cartoons lmao

Animation

Note: This is such a pure prompt, and this was very fun to write. There’s never such a thing as too much fluff with characters, and it warms my heart to receive Hanzo-based requests. Thank you for the request, and I do hope you like it!

“Please?” 

You stood across the dark-haired male, frowning, as he remained motionless to your begging. You clasped your hands together, puckering your lips and pouted, watching through feigned puppy eyes at the visibly irritated archer. He was unmoving, unaffected at your attempts of swaying him through an innocent visage. You had been pleading with him for quite some time at this point, but his stubbornness knew no bounds.

“Absolutely not.”You groaned in defeat, lowering your head and dropping your hands to your sides. You shook your head and watched him wander into the kitchen area without a second thought. Crossing your arms, you followed him, observing as he began to make something. At this point you felt like a persistent child, but you didn’t care, you wanted to try and swindle him down so that he would accompany you. Your eyes peered into his back, and you knew he could feel it. You tilted your head, waiting from a response from him, and your eyes widened a bit as you noticed him becoming still.

“You are acting like a child.” He spat, placing utensils down before turning to face you with a deadpan expression. “My answer remains as is.”“Hanzo, please–?” you whined, puffing your cheeks.“I find no entertainment in cartoons, nor will I watch them.” He arched an eyebrow as you glared at him, but his words remained as sharp ever. “Do not ask me again.”

Exhaling, you gave up, sensing how he was becoming not only uncomfortable but more agitated at the concept, and decided to leave him as is. You looked at him one last time before averting your gaze and heading to your shared living space area. For the past week you’ve been ‘reminding him’ of a very particular cartoon special that was happening in the next half hour. Whether it was through post-it notes on the refrigerator, messaging him, or even upfront telling him after his activities, you let it be known.

You turned on the television, sitting lotus position as episode reruns aired before the premier. You peered down to your cellphone in the meantime, scrolling through your feed in an attempt to not only distract yourself from the reruns, but also Hanzo refusing to watch them with you. Of course, he told you ‘no’ repeatedly, but you felt that he would eventually come around and decide to join you. Shrugging, you locked your phone and stared at the screen while you heard silverware be put away, among other things.

Ever since you were young, you were a huge fan of the original Teen Titans series, the only variant that you enjoyed was the original Teen Titans animated series that aired decades ago. They created a spinoff which you detested, as did many, but were relieved in the years following how they planned and actually made – not only a reboot to the original, but – a new series that followed the comic series exceptionally well. You were so excited now, to see the premier of your favourite series again.

Your face lit up as you saw the familiar faces of your favourite characters flash on the screen. Your eyes were wide in anticipation, and you giggled rewatching one of your most liked scenes from the rerun. You couldn’t help but grin widely as you watched energy bolts and dark magic drown the enemy forces as The Titans once again spar against the villains. Your heart fluttered at the calls from the characters as you lipped them perfectly, having memorized dialogue over the years. Leaning to the edge of the couch, you squealed in excitement, so much that you didn’t notice the archer next to you, or the cover that was around you.

Wait, what?

You blinked, tugging at the blanket that covered you, and turned to face him. He sipped from his tea cup, neatly placing it on the tray that was in front of the both of you on a stand. You blinked, making sure you were seeing things correctly, and felt a wave of warmth hit your cheeks. When did he sit next to you? When did you get the cover? You weren’t sure and couldn’t identify when any of this happened. You were so focused on the show, too much in your element, that you had ignored the happenings around you.

“Your level of awareness is appalling.” He uttered, causing you to pout, but not for long.

He glanced from the television screen to you, raising an eyebrow and huffed. Your expression gleamed, and your immediate reaction was to hug him with the biggest grin. “I knew it!” You giggled, leaning on him and staring into his eyes. “You were going to watch them with me.” You paused for just a moment before continuing. “My begging paid off.”

“I will humour you just this once,” he stated dryly, his expression still as concentrated as ever. You removed yourself from him momentarily before leaning your head on his arm, closing your eyes. You listened to the narrator on the screen before finding Hanzo adjusting himself to become more comfortable, all the while sitting upright as a gleeful you kept near him. Your heart beat fast, more than content that your lover was here with you right now.

“Thank you,” you spoke softly, looking at him with loving eyes. He took in your smile, his expression softening for only a moment, before hearing you tease him, “But I knew you would watch them with me.”

He rolled his eyes before scoffing, “How presumptuous of you.”

[thetrueenemyofhumanity]

Omg McCree and Demon!Hanzo. Like mccree seeing his demon side for the first time

Sorry this isn’t good, I just got some really bad news halfway through so I’m going to need to take a break for a while I’m so sorry guys!

Images of his brothers mangled body plagued Hanzo’s dreams.They always had ever since…Since he did what he did. McCree’s presence hadchased them away for a while, perhaps distracted him from the dark thoughts.But that bliss could only last so long. He shot upright in the bed, breathingheavily with a cold sweat across his skin. It took a few moments for the fearto pass and for Hanzo to realise the horrors were all just in his head.

“Y’a’ight sugar?” came McCree’s tired voice. He fought hisfatigue to roll over and wrap an arm around Hanzo.

He buried his face in his hands, his fingers brushing thebase of his horns. That is when a new fear crept up in him. He ripped away fromMcCree’s grip and scrambled out of bed, bolting to the bathroom. The door wasslam closed and locked before McCree had even sat up in the bed.

“Han?” he called, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, “Han!”

Concern erased all fatigue and McCree was up, furiouslybanging on the bathroom door in seconds. A knot formed in his stomach as therewas no reply from the other side of the door. But he persisted, eventhreatening to break down the door if needed.

“Leave me!” Hanzo demanded. His voice was warped, coming outas a beast-like snarl. “I am fine.”

“Not a chance, partner. Ya don’t sound fine so let me in.Look, if you’re sick the least I can do is hold back your hair, maybe get somewat-“

“I said I am fine now go!”

McCree swallowed a lump in his throat. He contemplatedabiding by Hanzo’s wishes, but that thought quickly vanished. It took aninstant to break the lock and step inside. Hanzo had no time to prepare, toeven cover himself, he simply looked in horror as McCree saw him for what hetruly was.

“Okay I know you wanted to be alone but I had to- Holy shitHanzo what the fuck?!” McCree yelled, stumbling back in shock.

Hanzo cast his white eyes to the ground, shame rising inhim.

“I am sorry I have deceived you, Jesse. I selfishly triedsparing you from the truth but now you know… I am a monster,” he growled,moving to leave. He came to a stop when McCree slammed his palm against thewall, extended arm blocking Hanzo’s path.

“Okay so this is actually thing and I am sober?” McCreeasked.

“Yes. At least sober by your standards.”

“And this is normal? Like it’s alright, is it? You’re nothurt or anything?”

“Wha-…I…You aren’t scared?” Hnazo demanded.

“Well I was for you, darlin’, I thought you were hurt. Iwont lie, I wasn’t expecting this and I’m a little surprised but this look ainthalf bad.”

“Jesse look at me! I am a demon! A filthy monster!”

“I am looking. And y’know what I see? You. You but with hornsand some greyish skin. That doesn’t make you a monster. Your actions determinethat. And I’ve done enough to earn that title. Look, I don’t care what you looklike, I love the man you are inside.”

Hanzo went to protest but McCree silenced him with a kiss.Hanzo was hesitant to return it but couldn’t resist melting against the otherman’s lips. For all his past sins, how was he lucky enough to be rewarded withhim?

[poutypanic]

Talon Woes

Fic is 18+ Non-Con Fem!Reader 

Link for AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11057685

You're a Talon agent, and things don't go as planned while out on a mission.

I really liked the new skin, let me live.

You’re in a very sticky situation. Working for Talon has gotten you into many nasty plights, but this time they really dropped the ball on the intel. There are far more Overwatch agents than you had previously thought there would be. This was supposed to be a simple mission, and things have gone severely awry. You’re running for your life, com lost, weapons empty, and with no real direction. Just away; away from the explosions, and away from all the agents that are hell bent on pacifying you.

There is one agent in particular that you're especially trying to keep an eye out for. He’s been on your ass from the moment things started to get out of hand. You keep your eyes to the roofs, all while trying not to trip or crash into anything. Rounding a corner into a rather dismal looking alleyway, you realize all too late that he’s been corralling you. It’s now when your mind flashes back to all those “missed” shots. All the arrows that skimmed past your head, narrowly missing piercing through your skull. The deadly arrows directing you into specific directions in an attempt to escape him.

He hasn’t been trying to kill you. He’s been trying to get you alone. What an idiot you are, letting your fear cloud your good sense of judgment. You try to see if you can make it back out of the alley, but another arrow flies just shy of cutting your throat open, sticking into the wall as a warning. You look up and see him, the cyber ninja that’s been giving you hell.

You know him. You’ve seen his face and name in Talon’s databases. Hanzo Shimada, the brother-killer. He’s got another arrow nocked, ready to be released, and aimed directly at your face. In one swift motion, he jumps from the top of the building. Hanzo lands gracefully in front of you and resumes his hostile stance. An arrow now inches from your throat. The entirety of his lower face is covered by a mask. But you can see his eyes, and the way they carry so much emotion. It lets you know he means business.

“I get it. You enjoy playing with your prey; now kill me.”

The heavy armor on his chest bends and shakes with his laughter.

“You assume too much. You are only partially right, Talon scum.”

Oh, so it’s torture that you’re in for.

“I don’t have any intel, you’d just be wasting your time, brother-killer.”

Hanzo presses the arrow to the base of your throat, “Wrong again.”

The archer nods to the side, indicating that you need to go where he says. You feign like you are going to be compliant, lifting up your hands, and turning your body slightly in the direction he wants you to go. At the best moment that you’ve got, you yank the arrow from his grasp and throw yourself into him. Hanzo crashes into the wall, and you take his momentary disorientation to try and bolt.

But you’re not fast enough. Never could have been fast enough. Hanzo expertly recovers and cruelly slams the bow into your gut. It causes you to tumble back a few feet. The wind is knocked out of your lungs, and you might have a bruised rib or two. Hanzo picks you up by hooking an arm around your neck, and he drags you along with him to a door you weren't aware was there. One of the smaller, less important things you’ve let slip past you today.

His strength is incredible. Hanzo tosses you inside with little effort, and you tumble and roll several times before the momentum allows you to stop. On your belly, you try to get yourself back up but it doesn't happen in time. He slams his knee down into your spine and keeps you from going anywhere. You’re cussing and kicking as he then uses the belt that was holding his pants up to tie your wrists behind your back.

Hanzo stands up so he can get a better view of the way you squirm and struggle to get out of your binds. As he hovers over you, you look up to see him rubbing his erection with the palm of his hand. If you weren't sure what he wanted before, you sure as hell know now.

“Perhaps this will teach you to align with a better crowd.”

“Your crowds not any better if they're anything like you."

“We are stronger, more skilled; therefore better. I am not the one tied up like an animal.”

Hanzo gets down on his knees behind you. Using tight grips on your hips he lifts your ass into the air and slowly removes your pants. He takes his time, because he wants to make sure you know you have no power here. You’re living on his time now and subject to his will. He glides a hand over your back side and travels into the hot space between your legs. He doesn’t give you any kind of warm up. Hanzo immediately shoves three large and rough fingers inside of you.

Everything about your body is betraying your mind. You’re pissed, but your pussy is wet. You’re humiliated, but your walls clench down around him. You can’t keep the moans from escaping your mouth.

More infuriating chuckles, “I knew filth like you would enjoy this.”

His fingers drive deeper; too deep. So deep that you can feel the wide base beyond his knuckles. You try to pull away, but he holds your hips right where he wants them. Before you can try and fight back anymore, Hanzo aligns his cock with your cunt and forces it inside of you while he still has his fingers taking up room. The rough fabric of the belt is setting your wrists on fire as you continue to try and get them free.

“You are only hurting yourself and making me harder.”

You wish that you had a witty retort. At the very least a few more curses to send his way. But all you can manage to do is groan and hope he’ll be done with you soon. With the way he’s fucking you, it seems that he might be.

Hanzo abruptly pulls out, but not because he’s done. He sits down, legs out, and effortlessly pulls you into his lap. Your back lays up against his chest, your knees on either side of his hips. He uses his thighs to keep your legs spread far apart. His cock slips back inside of you, and Hanzo forces your hips down onto his.

You cry out as he pushes past your comfort zone and continues to try and go farther. Hanzo’s mask rubs against your cheek as he rests his chin on your shoulder.

He whispers insults into your ear, "So undignified. Weak. This is the only thing you are good for."

Hanzo goes slow at first, resuming his air of casualness as he's forcing you to fuck him. He lifts your hips up and then down, again and again, until you finally start to do it on your own. He could easily drive himself into you, but he'd rather make you do it. The more you do as he wants, the faster this will be over, and you can get the fuck out of here. However, Hanzo quickly grows tired of your pace and decides to resume his own.

He bends your head down, using a harsh grip on your hair, “Watch as I fuck you.”

The harder he goes, the more your vision starts to blur with tears. Hanzo’s hand slips back into your crotch, so he can start roughly massaging your clit. A few tears fall onto his hand, and he yanks your face back so he can look at you. The pupils of his eyes are blown, and despite the mask, you can see the tell-tale signs of a grin.

“You are crying? Heh, heh. Pathetic.” Every time he laughs, it makes your stomach turn and the anger bubble to even higher levels.

Hanzo likes this better. Having your neck crooked painfully, so he can watch the torment of conflicting emotions dance their way across your face. When you come, it’s harder than you ever have before. Your mouth hangs open, and you’re embarrassingly loud. Deliciously loud to Hanzo. In fact, he thinks you could be louder. So he gives you all that he’s got and gets exactly what he wants. Shrill cries and moans, that echo off the walls of the room, music to his ears.

Hanzo gives no indications that he’s coming. No groans, growls, or moans. You can feel his cock twitch, however, and his hot seed spurt up into you. He holds you there in his lap until his dick is soft, and you’ve stopped whimpering. He lifts you up off of his cock, places his hand just underneath your pussy, and lets some of his come drip out into his hand. Before you even have time to register what is happening he shoves his fingers into your mouth, making you taste his salty-sweet seed.

Why he takes the time to redress you is a mystery, and it's frustrating. Of course, he can’t just leave; he can’t just fuck off and leave you to collect the dignity you’ve got left. What he does is release you from his belt, only to fashion actual cuffs around your wrists.

“Surely you did not think I would let you go? On your feet; it is time to go.”

[megsblackfirewrites]

The Family That Spies Together, Stays Together. Or Something to that Effect: Chapter 9

Chapter 9

“Director Petras.”

Jack leaned against the wall of the hotel room, gazing at the leader of Overwatch. The man looked shocked to see him, but quickly reigned it in. You don’t let spies like Jack see your fear; the director of a top secret project like Overwatch knew that better than anyone. Knew better than to let Jack, of all spies, know how scared he was. He was a predator waiting to pounce and Petras had wronged him.

His life was on the line.

“Jonathan,” Petras inclined his head. “It is good to see you in good health. I do apologize for the incident in New York.”

Jack smiled at his ex-boss. Was he really going to try to play off trying to get him and Lena killed by some two-bit terrorists as an accident? Did he really think that Jack was that stupid? Or, did he think that the killswitch was still at the base of his skull? If it was the latter, wasn’t he going to be in for a surprise when Jack didn’t start deteriorating immediately?

“New York is behind us,” Jack replied as he stepped away from the wall. “But, I still have questions.”

“Of course,” Petras smiled. “You always were the astute one, Jonathan. I’m sure you have many questions. I will provide the answers.”

“Why try to kill Lena?” Jack demanded. “She wasn’t a threat.”

“Lena was close to you. She meant something to you; I’m sure the ones who orchestrated the attack in New York were hoping to cripple you,” Petras replied.

“Like anything happened in Overwatch without your approval,” Gabriel growled as he solidified behind Petras. “You really think we’re that stupid, Petras?”

Petras stumbled away from Gabriel, looking between the two of them fearfully. “Gabriel…what are you doing here, traitor?”

Petras hadn’t known that Jack and Gabriel were working together. Good. That meant they were still off the radar. Well, they wouldn’t be when they were finished here, but that wouldn’t matter.

“Dealing with the bigger traitor,” Gabriel growled as he circled Petras. “You tried to kill my sunshine.”

Jack pulled his handgun out of his holster and snapped the safety off. “Little early, Gabe,” he sighed.

“You were toying with him,” Gabriel smirked. “I got bored.”

“Notice I didn’t do that when we killed your boss,” Jack snorted in amusement.

“Your loss,” Gabriel shrugged. “Now, how shall I kill you, Petras?”

“If you are wise, you will not,” Petras growled as he lifted a remote from his pocket. “You try and your ‘sunshine’ dies the most painful death imaginable.”

“Oh no,” Gabriel gasped dramatically. “Not the killswitch!”

“Gabriel, who’s playing with him now?” Jack chuckled. “It’s destroyed, Petras. Your killswitch is useless.”

Petras pressed the button and Jack felt a tremor down his spine. He cocked his head to the side before he lifted his hand. The flesh sloughed off of his fingers and he let out a concerned noise. Well, that wasn’t good. What the hell? They’d destroyed the damn thing!

“Uh, Gabe?” he called.

Gabriel looked over and snarled. “Son of a fucking bitch!”

He hurried over and dissolved Jack on the spot, pulling him into his mass before spinning on Petras. Petras tried to bolt for the door to the hotel room, but Gabriel was on him in a moment. Gabriel tore him apart, snarling furiously as Petras was reduced to a bloody mass on the ground. Gabriel circled the pile of gore before he pushed his hands into his chest.

“Jack?” he asked softly.

“Still here,” Jack soothed. “Guess the nanites were still going to listen that close to the controller.”

“I guess,” Gabriel growled as he pulled Jack’s mass out of his chest and helped him to reform. “Not sick?”

“I feel fine, Gabe,” Jack chuckled and kissed him. “Come on. Someone’s bound to come see what the screaming was all about.”

“Are they fucking again?” Sombra demanded.

She could hear the headboard on her parents’ bed slamming against the wall overhead. Genji looked up, Taka curled up on his lap, and blinked. Lena was pretending she didn’t hear anything as one of Hanzo’s blue dragons played with her hair. Jesse pulled his hat down over his face and groaned.

“You sound surprised, sis,” he said. “That’s all they do most days.”

“Jealous?” Hanzo asked as he cleaned his gun.

“Maybe a little,” Jesse waggled his eyebrows.

“Dog,” Hanzo teased before he got to his feet. “I’m going to look for information in town. Anyone tagging along?”

Everyone scrambled to their feet to follow him, leaving the safehouse just in time to avoid hearing Jack scream for Gabriel to fuck him harder.

“Kids gone?” Gabriel chuckled as the door slammed shut.

“Yup,” Jack laughed as he swung his legs over the arm of the chair. “You were having fun making the bed rock.”

Gabriel smirked and leaned against the mattress. “It’s fun to know I’m freaking the kids out,” he teased. “Now, are you going to come cuddle or do I have to pout?”

Jack rolled his eyes as he got to his feet and walked over. He dropped onto the mattress and rolled over, smiling as Gabriel climbed up on him. They kissed each other, laughing as Mars wiggled between them and playfully tried to push Gabriel off the bed. Gabriel collapsed on top of both of them, earning a string of squeaks and hisses from Mars before he shot out from between them and rolled across the bed like an angry ferret.

“I think someone’s jealous,” Gabriel chuckled as he snuggled down beside Jack and tucked his head into Jack’s shoulder.

Mars hissed before pouncing on him and pulled playfully on his ear. Gabriel chuckled and pushed the dragon off of him, wagging a finger as Mars rolled away again. Jack clicked his tongue and Mars happily snuggled under his jaw, glaring at Gabriel as he curled up.

“Think he’ll ever like me?” Gabriel asked.

“He likes you,” Jack shook his head. “He just finds it hilarious to bug you.”

Mars gave him a betrayed look before tucking his nose into his coils. Gabriel laughed and scratched around Mars’ horns. Jack smiled and kissed his guardian’s head.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” he teased. “You have to get used to having him around, Mars. He isn’t going anywhere.”

Mars clacked his jaw before flitting off to curl up on the chair. Gabriel smiled and pulled Jack close, tucking his nose into Jack’s neck.

This was how it should have been from the beginning. Him and Gabriel enjoying a few moments of quiet before they went out on their next mission. It was what he’d always wanted. The domestic between the killing and espionage. The moments of just them and their kids and their family. It was perfect. It was all he wanted.

He would do everything to maintain that. He’d lost one family before. He wasn’t going to do it again.

[lo-55]

Here There Be Dragons Ch. 1

The people of Hanamura knew better than to step foot in the old castle. The foreign criminals did not. Neither did the man tracking them.

McHanzo AU

                 Notes:    

This is loosely based on the Jackie Chan Adventures episode ‘The Lotus Temple’ .  It’s also my first time writing for McCree and Hanzo, so please be gentle with me ^^

Scales and Tales                 

 The people of Hanamura knew better than to step foot in the old castle. They had been born to the whispers of curses, to the dark clouds the circled over it for all but one day in the year. Their children played games, dared each other to touch the gate, to look upon the stone dragon that wrapped itself around the gates and glared down with eyes that warned of a storm. None of them were foolish enough to cross over the wall. None of them were foolish enough to dismiss generations of promises to never enter.

 To forsake their lives just for a glimpse inside.

 None of them were international weapons smuggler sprinting through the city with a target on their back. None of them were strangers jaded to the world and it’s supposed curses.

 None of them could recognize something ancient and powerful for what it was. And so they scrambled over walls, throwing backpacks and bodies over into a pile of weapons and limbs.

 One boy dropped down, landing on his ankle wrong. It was visible even from the vantage point Jesse McCree had taken up residence in. He leaned on the tree trunk, watching the kid scramble to pick up a bag when the one in charge, a nasty piece of work that called himself Glitch.

 The Blackwatch operative narrowed his eyes. If they got into the castle proper and fortified it, he’d have to cave and call for some back up, or say fuck it and just destroy half of the building in a firefight. If he took them out now, he’d be making a mess of a courtyard, but it would be quicker and over faster.

 Too bad Reyes wanted him to bring in Glitch alive. Too bad some of them were kids.

     You were a kid too, in Deadlock,    he reminded himself. He hadn’t been doing kid stuff then and these kids weren’t doing kid stuff now. If they’d come all this way from Germany, they knew what they were getting themselves in. No one worked for Glitch for long without knowing what it was going  to cost them.

 Jesse idly wondered if they knew that Glitch’s real name was Iverson Bemesderfer.

 Probably not.  

 Jesse breathed in deeply, mourning that he couldn't smoke on the clock, and drew his piece. He was readying himself to jump from tree to wall when a sound invaded his ears. It was almost too low for him to notice, at first.

 His implants picked it up before he really did. Typically they dulled the blast from gunfire so it didn’t blow his eardrums out, but they also caught and amplified certain things. Things that might register as a threat.

 Things like the low roll of thunder that beat inside the castle walls. The sky was clear, the castle was empty, save the invaders.

 Jesse blinked.

 Something moved. A flash of lightning through the courtyard, an explosion of action that cut through the crooks, leaving blood and guts in its wake. Blue caught the light, thunder grew louder, echoing in tandem with screaming. A gun went off, then another, a flurry of bullets flying at the flash of light that tore through the crowd.

 To the side a grenade went off, tearing through five men and throwing the blue back into a wall hard enough to crack it.

 For just an instant the carnage stilled. Jesse knew moments like these, when the fight went from hot to cold, bodies frozen in motion where the only things he could hear was the pounding of his heart and the world zeroed in to the sight at the end of Peacekeeper.

 This was different.

 The sound he heard drowned out his heart, the beat of thunder on the horizon. Peacekeeper stayed down, at his hip. That didn’t stop the ice in his veins. That didn’t stop the way the world darkened until there was only black and white and red and for the first time in his life blue.

 Blue. Brilliant, glowing, blinding      blue    burst through the Deadeye he didn’t call upon, burning itself into his memory. Scales shimmered in his vision where they fell to the ground, blue warring with red. The serpentine body curled in against the wall, stone collapse frozen around it.

 One of the kids had turned a machine gun on the creature when it impacted.

 Jesse blinked and the world returned. Peacekeeper smoked faintly in his hand and six bodies hit the ground. A girl who had hefted another grenade, the boy with the machine gun and the four people closest to Glitch. For an instant his eyes locked with the creature’s.

 His heart beat once and the beast erupted once more, red and blue lashing across the ground, cutting through bodies. It felt familiar, the death, the massacre, watching his targets fall. Not at his hand, true, but he knew folks that favored the blade over gun smoke or bare fists. It felt like that.

 Glitch had sense enough to turn tail and run, for the wall. Jesse couldn’t bear to tear his eyes away from the scene but he forced himself, vaulting to the ground to intercept, jogging to where Glitch would end up over the side. The shadow of his head fell over Jesse’s shoulders and he stepped back so he could be ready to subdue him. The target managed to get almost all the way over the wall before he screamed.

 Jesse met him beneath the red shingled, catching the part of his body that came down. Most of him, at least. His legs had been sheared off.

 Jesse touched his comm and called for a medic, focusing on what he knew. He coudln’t think about what he’d seen, what he’d learned was real. He had to keep his mind on the job, or he didn’t think he could keep from trying to catch one last glimpse of the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.

 The Dragon inside Hanamura Castle.

~

 What Jesse saw never made it into his official report, the one that went into the files that Blackwatch sent to Morrison. Jesse had almost withheld it from even Reyes, but in the end he told him the full truth, if for no other reason than he couldn't think up another way to explain that he’d only shot six people and when extraction had been completed there was no sign of anyone having been inside of Hanamura Castle at all.

 Jesse had no idea why Reyes believed him. As long as he didn’t send him to Mercy for a head check it was just fine by him. .

 After Glitch he had stuck mostly to the America’s, north and south. Hunting down other rogue agents, taking down gangs one at a time. Usually he was partnered up with someone, Genji preferably, or even Reyes on a couple of memorable,      explosive    , occasions.

 The next time he went to Hanamura it was on his own terms.

 Jesse passed the castle three times the first day. He knew that going the same place on repeat was a messy mistake, it made it easy to track him. Easy to make a target out of him. Jesse just couldn't help it. He was drawn to the building and the being inside of it.

 He wanted to know more.

 He asked around, but his Japanese was terrible and the english explanations he got were mostly centered around staying the hell away.

 The second day he climbed the tree he had been in two years before to look inside. There was no sign of the carnage, no sign of dragon. Nothing at all.

 Jesse left with a stone in his guts.

 He hung around his hotel room for the next few days, checking out where he was going next and berating himself for not just hopping the fence and going in.

 He cleaned his six shooter about a dozen times, polished his boots, mended his serape and anything else he could do to keep his mind occupied and off the castle. He wanted to go in. He wanted to see the dragon again.

 He did not want to die.

 Every time he almost got up the courage to poke his head into the dragons den he remembered Glitch’s legs. A single snap of massive jaws and they were both gone. Jesse was already missing one arm, he wasn’t sure he wanted to lose any more parts.

 He was putting Peacekeeper back together after her fourth cleaning of the day when a knock sounded on the door.

 “Housekeeping!” was announced. In a voice that didn’t match the one that had come every day before. Jesse had time enough to grab his hat before the door came off its hinges and he was shoved out the window from the power of the explosion.

 He hit the ground running.

~

 Jesse McCree was not known for his brilliant ideas. Genji thought he was ten pounds of crazy in a five pound bag and had delusions of immortality. Reyes thought he was a punk with a penchant for ignoring common sense. Morrison… Jesse didn’t even want to know what he thought.

 Maybe Genji was right. Maybe, Jesse was just totally insane and had diluted himself into thinking he could make plans that wouldn’t end up in his death. Jesse had always been a few steps ahead of the reaper, kept there by the bodies he dropped behind him. He’d only ever been good for talking shit and shootin folks, which probably explained how he’d gotten this hair brained scheme in his head in the first place.

 His boots beat against the back alley, splashing though he-didn’t-want-to-know-what. Footsteps followed him second behind, just far enough that he didn’t have to start dodging bullets yet. Peacekeeper rested heavy in his fingers, hammer pulled back, waiting to be released.

 He bolted around a corner, his aim coming into sight. The rooftops rose high in the setting sun. Jesse took a deep breath and poured on more speed so when he threw himself at the wall it was the momentum carried him halfway up. His free hand caught the top, metal clanging audibly and he swung himself up, over the top. A gun raport broke through the sounds of the city around just before Jesse rolled over the roof and dropped to the ground below.

 He crushed some poor, unsuspecting bush under his weight before he pulled himself out of the clawing foliage. Blood ran down his arm from the new hole in his shoulder, slicking his grip on his piece. Heat burned through his shoulder and along his ribs.

 He touched his side with his metal hand, hissing. Damn. He hadn’t been counting on being hit.

 Voices crowded around the wall he’d just dropped over, accompanied by the clinking of metal and the clicks of weaponry.

 At least that was going according to plan.

 Jesse wiped his bloody palm on his pants before he went back to running, steadying his grip on the pistol. Behind him, pursuers had started to climb the wall.

 “Sorry about all this, darlin,” he told the castle. “ Ah, wasn’t expectin’ all this trouble.”

 Which was ridiculous. He should have. Trouble followed him in a shadow of misfortune.

 More bodies dropped down behind him. He picked up his heels and ran. The front gate was in sight when he turned the corner. Blood trailed behind him. For a long minute he wondered if he really had lost his marbles those years before. If he had imagined the blue dragon.

 Then the thunder beat through the earth. Someone screamed behind him. Jesse threw himself forwards, against the gate, managing to scramble up. From the high ground he turned his sight back, to the dragon that tore through the pursuers like they were nothing more than paper.  It was incredible, awe inspiring.

 Jesse lifted his hand, pulled back the hammer and shot. One by one his targets fell, crumpling to the ground. Never once did he strike the dragon that coiled through the intruders. Jesse had seen rattlesnakes slower than this.

 The last of his pursuers crumpled to the ground, a bullet in their head. Wind blew through his hair, tugging at his hat. The thunder beat harder in his heart.

 Jesse opened his mouth to say something, anything. All that came out was a shout when the gate beneath his feet cracked and fell, collapsing backwards, sending the cowboy down with it. The air rushed from his lungs, leaving him choking desperately.

 He barely got his breath back when something cast a long shadow over him. Jesse brought his shooting hand up on instinct, levelled in between two gold eyes. The dragon loomed over him, baring its teeth. Thunder rumbled around him, growled from between the dragons fangs.

 “Well, don’t that beat all,” Jesse breathed. He sat up, slowly, letting the weapon drop. He could shoot from the hip just fine. The man drew his legs away from the creature’s fierce claws. His heavy boot knocked some stone, sending it clattering off the door and into the street. Tight muscles tensed under thick hide and the dragon moved a threatening inch closer. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so pretty in his life.

 Pretty like a rattler with it’s scales shining in the sun. Pretty like the barrel of Peacekeeper after he’d just polished her. Pretty like Ana Amari.

 Pretty and perfectly capable of killing him.

 Up close he could see it’s eyes in the burning light, golden, flecked with brown. Surrounding that was pale scales, practically white, beneath a slim patch of fur that could have been spun from his mama’s wedding band. Whiskers of the same color flicked in front of him, floating in the air with a serenity that was sharply opposed by the massive, pointed teeth being shown to him. Under the drawn lips was a beard that chased backwards, edging jaw that could have taken Jesse in whole. It edged up along with sharp point, horns maybe, that crowned the dragon’s head till the point of a blade of fur that drew from the tip of the head to the end of a long, long tail.

 “Ain’t you somethin’?” Jesse slowly moved, so as not to startle the creature, pushing himself into a stand. The dragon made no move to stop him. “Thank ya’ kindly for the help,” he nodded to the bloody mess behind the dragon and took a respectful step back, his heart beating hard.

 It released a growl that shook him to the core, one that rolled through the scales that flashed beautifully. Jesse realized that where the scales faded from the near-white around the eyes and lips into a deep, ocean shade they were tipped with the same gold he could see in the dragon’s eyes.

 Jesse took another step away, watching the dragon the whole time. As soon as his boots were off the door it jerked, twisting, and disappeared. Doors that been broken repaired themselves and lifted back into place. It shut hard.

 Jesse was left with a bullet in his shoulder, a graze in his side, and a pair of shaking knees.

 Something caught in the light, the stone he’d kicked earlier. It sang blue in the dimming light. Jesse did a recount.

 He also had a scale.

[solivar]

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

aka the one where Hanzo Shimada is an expatriate art student, Jesse McCree is an occasionally leather-clad NPS ranger, weird stuff is going down in the desert south of Santa Fe and their lives collide in the middle of it.

Calling it a cave was lending it a dignity it absolutely did not deserve but the alternative -- a crack, barely deep enough to hold both him and the little pack he carried simultaneously -- was the sort of defeatist thinking that Pop Pop Nate would have frowned upon pretty strenuously. It was, however, not really a cave and, as far as shelters went, it left plenty of things to be desired: it wasn’t big enough to stand up in and so he had to shove his pack in first and then crawl in after it, scrambling all the way across an unevenly angled floor covered in sand and sharp bits of stone that were destined to become lodged in places nobody ever wanted to have a pointy rock poking them. On the plus side, with the sun almost down, the entrance was already fully in shadow and it was only dumb luck that he’d spotted it himself, mostly concealed as it was behind a mass of tangled half-grown mesquite poking up through a drift of scree that might rattle as he walked on it but wouldn’t take a print no matter how heavy footed he was scrambling up. It was even a little bit warmer inside than out, the rising wind hissing through the mesquite branches but breaking around the entrance to his hidey hole so that only the barest lick of it reached him, tasting like snow, like ice.

NWS had been forecasting the possibility when he left the cabin and he didn’t quite dare bring out his little handheld to check the current weather, in case his pursuer had some means of tracking him that partook of triangulating comm signals, which was not beyond the bounds of reality. He likewise didn’t yet dare to bring out the package of nutrient-dense snack bars he’d stashed in his pack before leaving or wiggle the survival blanket out of the first aid kit, because opening up either one would make noise that could carry for miles and he had no practical idea how close or far away his pursuer might be. He’d lost sight of him once he’d scrambled down off the ridgeline himself and into the maze of defiles marking the edge of the valley, looking for someplace to take cover as darkness approached and the temperature dropped and the skies slowly clouded over. The last glimpse he’d had was Marcus silhouetted against the sky, rifle not quite leveled, as he’d scrambled behind a screen of brush and jumbled stone, the best part of an hour ago.

In the best part of another hour, it would be fully dark and then he would have a choice to make: hunker down in this little hole for the night and hope he didn’t freeze, even with the survival blanket, because he didn’t dare start a fire, or try to make his way back home under cover of night and hope that he didn’t leave a trail clear enough to follow back to his own doorstep or break an ankle in the dark or be caught out in the open with nowhere to run or hide. A thread of cold air found its way down his back, sliding over the collar of his jacket, and he tucked his legs closer to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, admitted that none of his choices were good.

From above, a loose stone clattered down the face of the rise to land somewhere to the right of his little hole. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep the fear-driven sound he felt crawling up his throat from escaping, along with his adrenaline-spiked heart, ricocheting around inside his ribcage as though it intended to flee completely independent of the rest of him.

Calm down. Calm down. It’s just a coyote out hunting or a squirrel headed back to its den. He forced himself to lower his hands, to breathe slowly, evenly, in through the nose, out through the mouth, to minimize the sound of it. Calm down calm down calm

“I know you’re here, Jesse.” Marcus Whitehawk’s voice drifted down from above.

Jesse’s hands found their way back over his mouth again.

“I know you can hear me.” Another rock, and then a few more, a steady trickle of sand, and now he could hear the scrape of hard boot soles against stone. “Come out now, stop running, and I’ll make it quick.”

Calm down calm down calm down. It was all he could do to not let the panic trying to claw its way out of his chest take over the pace of his breathing, permit little noises of distress to pass his lips. He can’t see you, he doesn’t know where you are, if he did he wouldn’t be trying to flush you, calm down.

“I’ll find you, one way or another.” The footsteps and the regular tumble of stone came to a halt. “Hard and slow or fast and painless, the choice is yours, Jesse.”

He buried his face in his knees, squeezed his eyes closed on the tears trying to well up, shook silently. After a moment, the footsteps continued on.

Can’t stay here. The thought crawled out of the panicked circles his brain was running in, the first coherent one in the minutes after. He’s going to circle down this way eventually, and when he does, he’ll -- He took a ragged, desperate breath, too loud. Wait till it’s a little more dark.

He inched closer to the entrance of his hiding place, and watched as the sky faded from dusky gold to vivid crimson-purple to the deep lingering blue of winter twilight, just enough light left to see the floor of the valley, still some distance below his own perch, enough to let him make his way down with only a little risk of falling or setting off an avalanche of scree himself. If he left. Right now.

It took him an unpardonably long time to actually reach back and gather up his pack, to ease himself out of the hidey hole legs first, crawl along under the mesquite bushes with excruciating slowness to avoid knocking any rocks askew -- well, okay, not too many rocks, because it was impossible to avoid at all and definitely harder in the near-dark. He kept himself tucked low to the ground once he passed beyond their dubious shelter, making himself as small as he could, just a part of the background clutter, the flesh between his shoulderblades crawling furiously with every step he took in the open.

Just keep going -- get to the valley floor and it’ll be easier to move, easier to run, you can take the long way around to the cabin and he might not even --

He heard the shot before he felt it -- a single sharp report, its echoes bouncing off a thousand surfaces -- and then he was falling, knocked off his feet, bouncing off loose masses of stone and stunted shrubs, coming to rest flat on his back at the base of the rise. His pack came off somewhere above, and he’d left most of his breath behind on the ride down, and his lungs seemed deeply disinclined to help catch it back, full of something too thick to inhale around. He coughed hard, spat blood, and the pain lanced through his chest at last, finding its way around shock, and his head spun, hot and throbbing. He should, he knew, try to get up, try to run, try to do something, anything, but he couldn’t breathe.

From an impossibly vast distance, he heard someone sliding down the decline. It took all his strength to lift his head, to force his eyes to focus, Marcus striding toward him, and he felt it, felt it like he hadn’t in years, roaring up inside him with the blood bubbling in his throat, in his lungs, throbbing in his temples and in his gut: hunger. Hunger sharp and hard and hot, clawing at his insides, thrashing in his veins and flesh and soul. He dragged in a painful, rattling breath and croaked, “Stay...back. Please..stay…”

He coughed again, and the taste of his own blood in his mouth, on his tongue, on his teeth, made everything worse, sharper and harder and hotter, like throwing kerosene on a fire made of twisted metal and broken glass. It roared in him, that hunger, split his gums and the tips of his fingers, didn’t care that he had a monster-killing bullet in his chest, wanted to rip and rend and tear and Marcus was not fucking stopping.

“Please,” It came out warped and twisted, around his new teeth and new tongue, the straining of his jaw, but if his not-cousin heard the difference he made no sign of it. “Stay --”

“Don’t move.” A foot came down on his chest, pinned him back to the hardpack, sent a bolt of pain through him that, for an instant, briefly eclipsed all else. The cold barrel of the rifle rested against his forehead. “I told you. You shouldn’t have run.”

Please, he wanted to say, but the pain tightening his chest, the blood boiling up his throat wouldn’t allow it. Please get back, I don’t want

He heard the rifle’s action work, heard the cartridge slide into place, heard the bolt click home. Smelled gun oil and powder and the blood pulsing in Marcus’ veins, the warmth of his flesh, the taste of his breath, and the hunger inside him rose up and roared. Distantly, he heard someone screaming. He thought, for a moment, before the world slid away into darkness, that it might be himself.

When Jesse opened his eyes, it was snowing. It was snowing and the wind was blowing hard out of the north and the icy kiss of it was scorching his face and hands, cutting through his wet clothing where it clung stickily to his body. His lashes clung together as he blinked, eyes blurry, spit thick, mouth tasting of iron and salt and something else he couldn’t quite identify. His eyes refused to blink clear and so he scrubbed at his face with the sleeve of his jacket, tacky-damp, and he finally recognized what he was tasting, the smell on the air that wasn’t snow.

Blood.

A lot of blood. In fact, he realized as his vision cleared and his head stopped revolving in slow, steady circles, that there wasn’t much left of Marcus but the muddy, slushy puddle a good bit of his blood had made. Jesse knelt at the edge of it, the knees of his jeans soaked through, sleeves of his jacket wet to the elbows, his hands still not quite right. A shred of flannel that had probably already been red poked out of the mess and there draped over one of the bigger rocks was a strip of skin with some lengths of long dark hair still attached and a couple little knobs of bone, meticulously scraped clean of flesh but too tough to bite through, scattered like dice on a kitchen table. He could feel the effort it had taken to do the scraping in the muscles of his jaw, in his teeth, and he curled around himself, wanted to be sick, wanted to heave up everything he’d just swallowed down, but his body absolutely refused to even consider the idea, smugly full and happy about it, lungs clear, pain gone. He squeezed his eyes closed and whispered prayers to every god and spirit and ancestor he could think of who might take the littlest trace of pity on him and make this not to have happened. When he opened them again, no god or spirit or ancestor had chosen to answer.

Get up, a little voice that might have been sanity or might have been something else whispered in the back of his mind. Get up you have to get up what if he wasn’t alone? What if there’s more of them out there and they find you here and they see this and

He found he didn’t care at all that there might be more and that they might find him and that they might see what he’d done. What followed after would only be just.

Get up, that little voice whispered again, go home, go back to the cabin, wash off, burn the clothes, call Gabe and Jack, tell them

And even the little voice flinched away from that. From telling them that. That he’d killed, that he’d eaten, that he’d failed them, that he’d betrayed everything they’d ever taught him and every word he’d sworn to them and everything he’d promised he’d be and that he wouldn’t do. That thought, of how ashamed and disappointed they would be, was what brought him to his feet, finally put a churning twist in his gut.

I can’t go back. The thought made itself heard and he knew it was true. There was no way he could go back to that little cabin, that safe and comfortable place that his grandparents had made, not now, not like this, with the blood of an innocent man drying on under his nails and his stomach still full of his meat. He could never go there again, because he wasn’t the person he’d been when he left -- he was something less now, and worse, and he turned away and walked north into the desert, into the hills, the cutting cold of the wind biting nowhere deep enough.

He walked for hours -- he had no idea how many, had no idea of how long any of what he’d done had taken, and found he didn’t care. The cold sank into him, and the dark, and he felt them only distantly, the snow freezing in his hair and the tears on his cheeks. He walked until the sky in the east grew slowly lighter, even behind the clouds, the dark fading from black to deepest blue and the sun finally rising sick and smeared and bloody on the horizon, casting deep shadows across the desert.

At his feet, a canyon yawned -- if he’d gone a few more feet in the dark, he’d have walked off the edge without ever seeing it, and the smile that curled his mouth and split his lips was bitter. He came to that edge now and looked down, down the striated and rust-red walls to the bottom, still deep in shadow -- jagged shadows, sharp and gnashing, like the hungry jaws of a starving beast.

It was, he thought, weary, sick, a long way down. Maybe long enough. He took a deep, searing cold breath, and turned. To the south, the wind was tearing the clouds apart, the last of the brightest stars just blinking out. He released his breath and let himself fall.

*

Hanzo opened his eyes with his gut and chest and head still full of the swooping, sickening, plunging sensation of falling to the comforting sight of the ranger’s carved and brightly painted bedroom ceiling. The relief this occasioned persisted for the whole three seconds it took for him to register that he was, in fact, falling. He hit the ranger’s likewise wooden floor with a force only slightly blunted by his state of partial mummification in a mass of sheets and blankets and comforter, landing with a thud and a stream of Japanglish invective that would have done Genji proud as he cracked his elbow, his shoulder, and his head more or less in sequence.

He lay there for a long moment afterwards, staring up at the dimly lit and now somewhat further away ceiling, lacking the energy or the ambition necessary to even consider moving. In the dark behind his eyes, he could still feel the sticky itch of blood drying on skin that wasn’t his own, the sick satisfaction of a belly full of something too awful to contemplate, and the echo, still ringing in his own bones, of finding the ground after a long fall. It occurred to him, as he lay there and the light coming through the seams in the shutters grew gradually brighter, that he hadn’t fallen off his side of the bed -- the kiva was on his side of the bed, and he was staring at the lowest part of the windows and the spot the ranger’s boots still occupied and chair that he couldn’t remember seeing before. He had rolled off the ranger’s side of the bed, and he hauled himself up with a groan and a few more enthusiastic Genjiisms to find that said bed was, in fact, empty of its other occupant, and most of the bedclothes were wrapped around him and the sheer intensity of the panic that galloped through him at that realization was the sort of thing that the better class of neo-country-western singers wrote lugubrious ballads about. He could practically hear the chorus as he extricated himself from the tangle of both the top and bottom sheets: my ranger’s gone, he’s run away, I can’t find him, night or day, I love him so, I want him back, something something probably involving a trusty pickup or possibly a dog named Blue.

The kitchen was empty: no dishes in the sink or in the dish drainer, no coffee in the coffee pot, the kettle cold. Even worse: nobody in the sitting room. The blankets Hana used the night before were neatly folded on the couch, pillows piled on top. No enormous green dog occupied the floor in front of the fireplace, nor did anyone’s terrifying smoke Dad keep residence in any of the chairs along with an unknown but deeply disturbing number of half-finished knitting projects. The space in front of the house, previously containing a tragic welding accident in the vague shape of a WinneUFO, was likewise void, though tire tracks in the dusty road suggested the direction of its coming and going. His own phone and tablet still sat on the coffee table, charge cords reading green, and he snatched the cell up, rewarded with actual bars of connection. He drifted back into the kitchen as he thumbed it open and speed-dialed Genji’s number.

“Hey, Hanzo.” The voice that answered was not his brother’s but Hana’s and his knees went stupidly weak enough with relief under him that he had to lean on the counter to stay upright. “Have a good night’s rest?”

“Where are you?” He demanded by way of answer. “Where’s everybody, Jesse wasn’t in bed when I woke up, what’s --”

“Easy, easy. Calm down. I left a note. Didn’t you see it?” She did not sound the slightest bit worried, or contrite, a fact he found rather significantly nettlesome.

“Hana. Never, in the entire history of time, has telling someone to calm down ever succeeded in calming them down.” Hanzo replied, tensely, scanning the counters, the prep island, the cupboards, and finally coming to rest on the refrigerator, where a magnetic note board hung in plain view bearing the words: Went up to the hacienda for waffles. Join us when you wake up. We’ll save at least two pieces of bacon. H. “I see it now. Is Jesse with you?”

“No.” An expressive noise just slightly too feminine to be a genuine snort. “And between you and me I really doubt that Ranger McThoughtful would leave you by yourself after all the crap we’ve been through in the last seventy-two hours. Have you checked outside?”

“Not yet.” He peered out the kitchen window and found the junipers dancing gently in the breeze with a little dust devil, but no ranger in immediate view. “I just woke up a few minutes ago, I had a weird --” dream not a dream that wasn’t a dream that was too real that was something that happened that happened to him “-- dream, I fell out of bed and that’s when I realized he was gone and --” Hana giggled. “What exactly is so funny?”

“You.” Hana replied, amusement evident. “Seriously, take a breath. Have you looked --”

“Hanzo?” The voice came from behind and to the right, the corridor that led to the bedroom -- and also the bathroom. Where he had not, in fact, even thought to look because he was an idiot.

Hanzo turned and there he stood.

There he stood, with a deeply concerned look on his face, a little worry-mark engraved between his perfect brows, his beard obviously freshly trimmed and combed.

There he stood, with a towel draped around his shoulders, catching the drops of water dripping off his still-damp brown ringlets, runnels of which were still dripping down his chest, spangling the curls there like tiny, exquisite diamonds, trailing over the ridged muscles of his belly.

There he stood, with a second towel wrapped around his trim waist, knotted in place on one hip, the full length of one muscular thigh thus exposed, tawny skin gleaming wetly in the indirect light coming through the kitchen windows.

There he stood and were those fuzzy jackalope slippers? They were. Fuzzy jackalope slippers. Somehow that brought the entire look together.

Hanzo took a deep breath, said, “Never mind, I found him” and hung up. Before the call disconnected, he heard Hana cackling shamelessly. He was going to have to have a word with that woman.

“Hanzo.” The ranger -- oh for fuck’s sake, you’ve slept in the same bed with him TWICE now, just call him by his NAME -- was looking at him now with open and serious alarm, as though he were afraid one wrong move would send him jumping out the kitchen window and he would have laughed it he weren’t fairly sure it would come out sounding half-crazed. “Are you okay, darlin’? You look a little --”

He crossed the room in three strides and, before he could let any of the million immediately occurring reasons not to do it avail themselves of control, threw his arms around him and clutched him tight, trying hard not to shake too obviously. For a second, the ranger stood absolutely stock startled still -- stiff, not knowing what to do with his hands, breath catching under his ear and heartbeat tripping noticeably higher -- and then the tension melted, arms closed around him in return, a hand coming to rest in the loose mess of hair at the back of his neck.

“Easy,” Jesse’s voice was a lower, rougher around the edges than usual. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” Callused fingertips stroked his neck, the shorter hair on the back of his head. “What was it, darlin’? Bad dream?”

No. “Something like that.” He took a deep breath, filled his lungs and head with the scent of sage-cedar-spice, stronger even than usual, his own hand resting spread on Jesse’s back. Jesse’s mostly-bare, still a little wet back, firm muscle and mostly smooth, warm skin and all of the blood immediately tried to evacuate his head, a whole-body shiver running from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes.

“Must have been a real bad one.” His ranger murmured against his ear, the hitch still in his breath, warm against his skin, and Hanzo was intensely conscious of Jesse’s hand resting against the small of his back, still tangled in his hair. “You’re shakin’ all over. Maybe we should --”

“Jesse.” Hanzo’s gently questing hand came to rest on a not-smooth patch, smaller than he thought it would be, just under Jesse’s right shoulder blade. “I dreamt of you.”

“...Me?” And suddenly all his warm soothing calm was gone, every inch of his body tensing, including his voice. “What -- what did you --”

“I dreamt that you were afraid.” Hanzo said and found he didn’t quite have the courage necessary to turn and watch his face as he spoke -- especially since doing so meant stepping back, letting him go, even a little. “I dreamt you were running, hunted and afraid and alone.” He stopped, his mouth suddenly, painfully dry. “Hurt.”

Jesse’s skin pebbled with gooseflesh under his hands and now it was his turn to shiver.

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?” Hanzo whispered against his ranger’s neck. “It was real, a memory.”

Silence. Jesse’s hands slid out of his hair and the small of his back, came to rest on his hips, lightly, as though he were afraid to hold on too tightly. When he finally spoke, his voice was a toneless rasp. “Yes. It was -- that was real.” A ragged breath. “You...saw.”

“Yes.” Hanzo closed his arms tight, clung to his shoulders as he tried to pull away. “Jesse. Stop. Please. It wasn’t your fault!”

He did, at least, stop trying to push him away, though he suspected it was more out of surprise than any real desire to do so. “Of course it was my fault. I was scared and hurt and I lost control and I --” His voice cracked, his grip tightened, almost painfully. “You saw what I did.”

“You defended yourself. In the alternate reality where I live, when someone shoots you in the back from ambush? It’s called attempted murder.” Hanzo replied, fiercely, and now he did pull back, reached up and caught Jesse’s face in his hands -- his eyes were bright with unshed tears, the pain and grief and regret etched in every line. “You’re allowed to not let someone kill you, no matter how justified they might think they are. Gods and dragons, Jesse, you were a child -- a child who just lost his family -- you didn’t deserve that.”

“Neither did he.” Jesse took hold of his wrists and gently pulled his hands away, turned back toward the hallway, his shoulders hunched as though he were still expecting a blow.   

“Do you dream of that often?” Hanzo asked and Jesse froze in the door arch, his arms closing around himself.

“Not as often as I used to.” Roughly. “Let me get dressed and...we’ll talk.”

[solivar]

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

aka the one where Hanzo Shimada is an expatriate student of the Fine Arts, attending college in what he assumes to be a reasonably sedate corner of the American southwest. Jesse McCree is an occasionally leather-clad NPS ranger whose duties extend somewhat further than shooing lost tourists back onto the clearly marked hiking trails. Something weird is going on in the desert south of Santa Fe and their lives unexpectedly come together in the middle of it.

In which Hanzo has a moment.

Calling it a cave was lending it a dignity it absolutely did not deserve but the alternative -- a crack, barely deep enough to hold both him and the little pack he carried simultaneously -- was the sort of defeatist thinking that Pop Pop Nate would have frowned upon pretty strenuously. It was, however, not really a cave and, as far as shelters went, it left plenty of things to be desired: it wasn’t big enough to stand up in and so he had to shove his pack in first and then crawl in after it, scrambling all the way across an unevenly angled floor covered in sand and sharp bits of stone that were destined to become lodged in places nobody ever wanted to have a pointy rock poking them. On the plus side, with the sun almost down, the entrance was already fully in shadow and it was only dumb luck that he’d spotted it himself, mostly concealed as it was behind a mass of tangled half-grown mesquite poking up through a drift of scree that might rattle as he walked on it but wouldn’t take a print no matter how heavy footed he was scrambling up. It was even a little bit warmer inside than out, the rising wind hissing through the mesquite branches but breaking around the entrance to his hidey hole so that only the barest lick of it reached him, tasting like snow, like ice.

NWS had been forecasting the possibility when he left the cabin and he didn’t quite dare bring out his little handheld to check the current weather, in case his pursuer had some means of tracking him that partook of triangulating comm signals, which was not beyond the bounds of reality. He likewise didn’t yet dare to bring out the package of nutrient-dense snack bars he’d stashed in his pack before leaving or wiggle the survival blanket out of the first aid kit, because opening up either one would make noise that could carry for miles and he had no practical idea how close or far away his pursuer might be. He’d lost sight of him once he’d scrambled down off the ridgeline himself and into the maze of defiles marking the edge of the valley, looking for someplace to take cover as darkness approached and the temperature dropped and the skies slowly clouded over. The last glimpse he’d had was Marcus silhouetted against the sky, rifle not quite leveled, as he’d scrambled behind a screen of brush and jumbled stone, the best part of an hour ago.

In the best part of another hour, it would be fully dark and then he would have a choice to make: hunker down in this little hole for the night and hope he didn’t freeze, even with the survival blanket, because he didn’t dare start a fire, or try to make his way back home under cover of night and hope that he didn’t leave a trail clear enough to follow back to his own doorstep or break an ankle in the dark or be caught out in the open with nowhere to run or hide. A thread of cold air found its way down his back, sliding over the collar of his jacket, and he tucked his legs closer to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, admitted that none of his choices were good.

From above, a loose stone clattered down the face of the rise to land somewhere to the right of his little hole. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep the fear-driven sound he felt crawling up his throat from escaping, along with his adrenaline-spiked heart, ricocheting around inside his ribcage as though it intended to flee completely independent of the rest of him.

Calm down. Calm down. It’s just a coyote out hunting or a squirrel headed back to its den. He forced himself to lower his hands, to breathe slowly, evenly, in through the nose, out through the mouth, to minimize the sound of it. Calm down calm down calm

“I know you’re here, Jesse.” Marcus Whitehawk’s voice drifted down from above.

Jesse’s hands found their way back over his mouth again.

“I know you can hear me.” Another rock, and then a few more, a steady trickle of sand, and now he could hear the scrape of hard boot soles against stone. “Come out now, stop running, and I’ll make it quick.”

Calm down calm down calm down. It was all he could do to not let the panic trying to claw its way out of his chest take over the pace of his breathing, permit little noises of distress to pass his lips. He can’t see you, he doesn’t know where you are, if he did he wouldn’t be trying to flush you, calm down.

“I’ll find you, one way or another.” The footsteps and the regular tumble of stone came to a halt. “Hard and slow or fast and painless, the choice is yours, Jesse.”

He buried his face in his knees, squeezed his eyes closed on the tears trying to well up, shook silently. After a moment, the footsteps continued on.

Can’t stay here. The thought crawled out of the panicked circles his brain was running in, the first coherent one in the minutes after. He’s going to circle down this way eventually, and when he does, he’ll -- He took a ragged, desperate breath, too loud. Wait till it’s a little more dark.

He inched closer to the entrance of his hiding place, and watched as the sky faded from dusky gold to vivid crimson-purple to the deep lingering blue of winter twilight, just enough light left to see the floor of the valley, still some distance below his own perch, enough to let him make his way down with only a little risk of falling or setting off an avalanche of scree himself. If he left. Right now.

It took him an unpardonably long time to actually reach back and gather up his pack, to ease himself out of the hidey hole legs first, crawl along under the mesquite bushes with excruciating slowness to avoid knocking any rocks askew -- well, okay, not too many rocks, because it was impossible to avoid at all and definitely harder in the near-dark. He kept himself tucked low to the ground once he passed beyond their dubious shelter, making himself as small as he could, just a part of the background clutter, the flesh between his shoulderblades crawling furiously with every step he took in the open.

Just keep going -- get to the valley floor and it’ll be easier to move, easier to run, you can take the long way around to the cabin and he might not even --

He heard the shot before he felt it -- a single sharp report, its echoes bouncing off a thousand surfaces -- and then he was falling, knocked off his feet, bouncing off loose masses of stone and stunted shrubs, coming to rest flat on his back at the base of the rise. His pack came off somewhere above, and he’d left most of his breath behind on the ride down, and his lungs seemed deeply disinclined to help catch it back, full of something too thick to inhale around. He coughed hard, spat blood, and the pain lanced through his chest at last, finding its way around shock, and his head spun, hot and throbbing. He should, he knew, try to get up, try to run, try to do something, anything, but he couldn’t breathe.

From an impossibly vast distance, he heard someone sliding down the decline. It took all his strength to lift his head, to force his eyes to focus, Marcus striding toward him, and he felt it, felt it like he hadn’t in years, roaring up inside him with the blood bubbling in his throat, in his lungs, throbbing in his temples and in his gut: hunger. Hunger sharp and hard and hot, clawing at his insides, thrashing in his veins and flesh and soul. He dragged in a painful, rattling breath and croaked, “Stay...back. Please..stay…”

He coughed again, and the taste of his own blood in his mouth, on his tongue, on his teeth, made everything worse, sharper and harder and hotter, like throwing kerosene on a fire made of twisted metal and broken glass. It roared in him, that hunger, split his gums and the tips of his fingers, didn’t care that he had a monster-killing bullet in his chest, wanted to rip and rend and tear and Marcus was not fucking stopping.

“Please,” It came out warped and twisted, around his new teeth and new tongue, the straining of his jaw, but if his not-cousin heard the difference he made no sign of it. “Stay --”

“Don’t move.” A foot came down on his chest, pinned him back to the hardpack, sent a bolt of pain through him that, for an instant, briefly eclipsed all else. The cold barrel of the rifle rested against his forehead. “I told you. You shouldn’t have run.”

Please, he wanted to say, but the pain tightening his chest, the blood boiling up his throat wouldn’t allow it. Please get back, I don’t want

He heard the rifle’s action work, heard the cartridge slide into place, heard the bolt click home. Smelled gun oil and powder and the blood pulsing in Marcus’ veins, the warmth of his flesh, the taste of his breath, and the hunger inside him rose up and roared. Distantly, he heard someone screaming. He thought, for a moment, before the world slid away into darkness, that it might be himself.

When Jesse opened his eyes, it was snowing. It was snowing and the wind was blowing hard out of the north and the icy kiss of it was scorching his face and hands, cutting through his wet clothing where it clung stickily to his body. His lashes clung together as he blinked, eyes blurry, spit thick, mouth tasting of iron and salt and something else he couldn’t quite identify. His eyes refused to blink clear and so he scrubbed at his face with the sleeve of his jacket, tacky-damp, and he finally recognized what he was tasting, the smell on the air that wasn’t snow.

Blood.

A lot of blood. In fact, he realized as his vision cleared and his head stopped revolving in slow, steady circles, that there wasn’t much left of Marcus but the muddy, slushy puddle a good bit of his blood had made. Jesse knelt at the edge of it, the knees of his jeans soaked through, sleeves of his jacket wet to the elbows, his hands still not quite right. A shred of flannel that had probably already been red poked out of the mess and there draped over one of the bigger rocks was a strip of skin with some lengths of long dark hair still attached and a couple little knobs of bone, meticulously scraped clean of flesh but too tough to bite through, scattered like dice on a kitchen table. He could feel the effort it had taken to do the scraping in the muscles of his jaw, in his teeth, and he curled around himself, wanted to be sick, wanted to heave up everything he’d just swallowed down, but his body absolutely refused to even consider the idea, smugly full and happy about it, lungs clear, pain gone. He squeezed his eyes closed and whispered prayers to every god and spirit and ancestor he could think of who might take the littlest trace of pity on him and make this not to have happened. When he opened them again, no god or spirit or ancestor had chosen to answer.

Get up, a little voice that might have been sanity or might have been something else whispered in the back of his mind. Get up you have to get up what if he wasn’t alone? What if there’s more of them out there and they find you here and they see this and

He found he didn’t care at all that there might be more and that they might find him and that they might see what he’d done. What followed after would only be just.

Get up, that little voice whispered again, go home, go back to the cabin, wash off, burn the clothes, call Gabe and Jack, tell them

And even the little voice flinched away from that. From telling them that. That he’d killed, that he’d eaten, that he’d failed them, that he’d betrayed everything they’d ever taught him and every word he’d sworn to them and everything he’d promised he’d be and that he wouldn’t do. That thought, of how ashamed and disappointed they would be, was what brought him to his feet, finally put a churning twist in his gut.

I can’t go back. The thought made itself heard and he knew it was true. There was no way he could go back to that little cabin, that safe and comfortable place that his grandparents had made, not now, not like this, with the blood of an innocent man drying on under his nails and his stomach still full of his meat. He could never go there again, because he wasn’t the person he’d been when he left -- he was something less now, and worse, and he turned away and walked north into the desert, into the hills, the cutting cold of the wind biting nowhere deep enough.

He walked for hours -- he had no idea how many, had no idea of how long any of what he’d done had taken, and found he didn’t care. The cold sank into him, and the dark, and he felt them only distantly, the snow freezing in his hair and the tears on his cheeks. He walked until the sky in the east grew slowly lighter, even behind the clouds, the dark fading from black to deepest blue and the sun finally rising sick and smeared and bloody on the horizon, casting deep shadows across the desert.

At his feet, a canyon yawned -- if he’d gone a few more feet in the dark, he’d have walked off the edge without ever seeing it, and the smile that curled his mouth and split his lips was bitter. He came to that edge now and looked down, down the striated and rust-red walls to the bottom, still deep in shadow -- jagged shadows, sharp and gnashing, like the hungry jaws of a starving beast.

It was, he thought, weary, sick, a long way down. Maybe long enough. He took a deep, searing cold breath, and turned. To the south, the wind was tearing the clouds apart, the last of the brightest stars just blinking out. He released his breath and let himself fall.

*

Hanzo opened his eyes with his gut and chest and head still full of the swooping, sickening, plunging sensation of falling to the comforting sight of the ranger’s carved and brightly painted bedroom ceiling. The relief this occasioned persisted for the whole three seconds it took for him to register that he was, in fact, falling. He hit the ranger’s likewise wooden floor with a force only slightly blunted by his state of partial mummification in a mass of sheets and blankets and comforter, landing with a thud and a stream of Japanglish invective that would have done Genji proud as he cracked his elbow, his shoulder, and his head more or less in sequence.

He lay there for a long moment afterwards, staring up at the dimly lit and now somewhat further away ceiling, lacking the energy or the ambition necessary to even consider moving. In the dark behind his eyes, he could still feel the sticky itch of blood drying on skin that wasn’t his own, the sick satisfaction of a belly full of something too awful to contemplate, and the echo, still ringing in his own bones, of finding the ground after a long fall. It occurred to him, as he lay there and the light coming through the seams in the shutters grew gradually brighter, that he hadn’t fallen off his side of the bed -- the kiva was on his side of the bed, and he was staring at the lowest part of the windows and the spot the ranger’s boots still occupied and chair that he couldn’t remember seeing before. He had rolled off the ranger’s side of the bed, and he hauled himself up with a groan and a few more enthusiastic Genjiisms to find that said bed was, in fact, empty of its other occupant, and most of the bedclothes were wrapped around him and the sheer intensity of the panic that galloped through him at that realization was the sort of thing that the better class of neo-country-western singers wrote lugubrious ballads about. He could practically hear the chorus as he extricated himself from the tangle of both the top and bottom sheets: my ranger’s gone, he’s run away, I can’t find him, night or day, I love him so, I want him back, something something probably involving a trusty pickup or possibly a dog named Blue.

The kitchen was empty: no dishes in the sink or in the dish drainer, no coffee in the coffee pot, the kettle cold. Even worse: nobody in the sitting room. The blankets Hana used the night before were neatly folded on the couch, pillows piled on top. No enormous green dog occupied the floor in front of the fireplace, nor did anyone’s terrifying smoke Dad keep residence in any of the chairs along with an unknown but deeply disturbing number of half-finished knitting projects. The space in front of the house, previously containing a tragic welding accident in the vague shape of a WinneUFO, was likewise void, though tire tracks in the dusty road suggested the direction of its coming and going. His own phone and tablet still sat on the coffee table, charge cords reading green, and he snatched the cell up, rewarded with actual bars of connection. He drifted back into the kitchen as he thumbed it open and speed-dialed Genji’s number.

“Hey, Hanzo.” The voice that answered was not his brother’s but Hana’s and his knees went stupidly weak enough with relief under him that he had to lean on the counter to stay upright. “Have a good night’s rest?”

“Where are you?” He demanded by way of answer. “Where’s everybody, Jesse wasn’t in bed when I woke up, what’s --”

“Easy, easy. Calm down. I left a note. Didn’t you see it?” She did not sound the slightest bit worried, or contrite, a fact he found rather significantly nettlesome.

“Hana. Never, in the entire history of time, has telling someone to calm down ever succeeded in calming them down.” Hanzo replied, tensely, scanning the counters, the prep island, the cupboards, and finally coming to rest on the refrigerator, where a magnetic note board hung in plain view bearing the words: Went up to the hacienda for waffles. Join us when you wake up. We’ll save at least two pieces of bacon. H. “I see it now. Is Jesse with you?”

“No.” An expressive noise just slightly too feminine to be a genuine snort. “And between you and me I really doubt that Ranger McThoughtful would leave you by yourself after all the crap we’ve been through in the last seventy-two hours. Have you checked outside?”

“Not yet.” He peered out the kitchen window and found the junipers dancing gently in the breeze with a little dust devil, but no ranger in immediate view. “I just woke up a few minutes ago, I had a weird --” dream not a dream that wasn’t a dream that was too real that was something that happened that happened to him “-- dream, I fell out of bed and that’s when I realized he was gone and --” Hana giggled. “What exactly is so funny?”

“You.” Hana replied, amusement evident. “Seriously, take a breath. Have you looked --”

“Hanzo?” The voice came from behind and to the right, the corridor that led to the bedroom -- and also the bathroom. Where he had not, in fact, even thought to look because he was an idiot.

Hanzo turned and there he stood.

There he stood, with a deeply concerned look on his face, a little worry-mark engraved between his perfect brows, his beard obviously freshly trimmed and combed.

There he stood, with a towel draped around his shoulders, catching the drops of water dripping off his still-damp brown ringlets, runnels of which were still running down his chest, spangling the curls there like tiny, exquisite diamonds, trailing over the ridged muscles of his belly.

There he stood, with a second towel wrapped around his trim waist, knotted in place on one hip, the full length of one muscular thigh thus exposed, tawny skin gleaming wetly in the indirect light coming through the kitchen windows.

There he stood and were those fuzzy jackalope slippers? They were. Fuzzy jackalope slippers. Somehow that brought the entire look together.

Hanzo took a deep breath, said, “Never mind, I found him” and hung up. Before the call disconnected, he heard Hana cackling shamelessly. He was going to have to have a word with that woman.  

[solivar]

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

aka the one where Hanzo Shimada is an expatriate art student, Jesse McCree is an occasionally leather-clad NPS ranger, both are more than they seem, something weird is going down in the New Mexican desert, and their lives collide in the middle of it.

Jesse didn’t want them to share dreamspace for a reason.

Calling it a cave was lending it a dignity it absolutely did not deserve but the alternative -- a crack, barely deep enough to hold both him and the little pack he carried simultaneously -- was the sort of defeatist thinking that Pop Pop Nate would have frowned upon pretty strenuously. It was, however, not really a cave and, as far as shelters went, it left plenty of things to be desired: it wasn’t big enough to stand up in and so he had to shove his pack in first and then crawl in after it, scrambling all the way across an unevenly angled floor covered in sand and sharp bits of stone that were destined to become lodged in places nobody ever wanted to have a pointy rock poking them. On the plus side, with the sun almost down, the entrance was already fully in shadow and it was only dumb luck that he’d spotted it himself, mostly concealed as it was behind a mass of tangled half-grown mesquite poking up through a drift of scree that might rattle as he walked on it but wouldn’t take a print no matter how heavy footed he was scrambling up. It was even a little bit warmer inside than out, the rising wind hissing through the mesquite branches but breaking around the entrance to his hidey hole so that only the barest lick of it reached him, tasting like snow, like ice.

NWS had been forecasting the possibility when he left the cabin and he didn’t quite dare bring out his little handheld to check the current weather, in case his pursuer had some means of tracking him that partook of triangulating comm signals, which was not beyond the bounds of reality. He likewise didn’t yet dare to bring out the package of nutrient-dense snack bars he’d stashed in his pack before leaving or wiggle the survival blanket out of the first aid kit, because opening up either one would make noise that could carry for miles and he had no practical idea how close or far away his pursuer might be. He’d lost sight of him once he’d scrambled down off the ridgeline himself and into the maze of defiles and switchbacks marking the edge of the valley, looking for someplace to take cover as darkness approached and the temperature dropped and the skies slowly clouded over. The last glimpse he’d had was Marcus silhouetted against the sky, rifle not quite leveled, as he’d scrambled behind a screen of brush and jumbled stone, the best part of an hour ago.

In the best part of another hour, it would be fully dark and then he would have a choice to make: hunker down in this little hole for the night and hope he didn’t freeze, even with the survival blanket, because he didn’t dare start a fire, or try to make his way back home under cover of night and hope that he didn’t leave a trail clear enough to follow back to his own doorstep or break an ankle in the dark or be caught out in the open with nowhere to run or hide. A thread of cold air found its way down his back, sliding over the collar of his jacket, and he tucked his legs closer to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, admitted that none of his choices were good.

From above, a loose stone clattered down the face of the rise to land somewhere to the right of his little hole. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep the fear-driven sound he felt forming in his chest and crawling up his throat from escaping into the air, along with his adrenaline-spiked heart, ricocheting around inside his ribcage as though it intended to flee completely independent of the rest of him.

Calm down. Calm down. It’s just a coyote out hunting or a squirrel headed back to its den. He forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly, in through the nose, out through the mouth, to minimize the sound of it. Calm down calm down calm

“I know you’re here, Jesse.” Marcus Whitehawk’s voice drifted down from above.

Jesse’s hands found their way back over his mouth again.

“I know you can hear me.” Another rock, and then a few more, a steady trickle of sand, and now he could hear the scrape of hard boot soles against stone. “Come out now, stop running, and I’ll make it quick.”

Calm down calm down calm down. It was all he could do to not let the panic trying to claw its way out of his chest take over the pace of his breathing, permit little noises of distress to pass his lips. He can’t see you, he doesn’t know where you are, if he did he wouldn’t be trying to flush you, calm down.

“I’ll find you, one way or another.” The footsteps and the regular tumble of stone came to a halt. “Hard and slow or fast and painless, the choice is yours, Jesse.”

He buried his face in his knees, squeezed his eyes closed on the tears trying to well up, shook silently. After a moment, the footsteps continued on.

Can’t stay here. The thought crawled out of the panicked circles his brain was running in, the first coherent one in the minutes after. He’s going to circle down this way eventually, and when he does, he’ll -- He took a ragged, desperate breath, too loud. Wait till it’s a little more dark.

He inched closer to the entrance of his hiding place, and watched as the sky faded from dusky gold to vivid crimson-purple to the deep lingering blue of winter twilight, just enough light left to see the floor of the valley, still some distance below his own perch, enough to let him make his way down with only a little risk of falling or setting off an avalanche of scree himself. If he left. Right now.

It took him an unpardonably long time to actually reach back and gather up his pack, to ease himself out of the hidey hole legs first, crawl along under the mesquite bushes with excruciating slowness to avoid knocking any rocks askew -- well, okay, not too many rocks, because it was impossible to avoid at all but definitely harder in the near-dark. He kept himself tucked low as he could once he passed beyond their dubious shelter, making himself as small as he could, just a part of the background clutter, the flesh between his shoulderblades crawling furiously with every step he took in the open.

Just keep going -- get to the valley floor and it’ll be easier to move, easier to run, you can take the long way around and he might not even --

He heard the shot before he felt it -- a single sharp report, its echoes bouncing off a thousand surfaces -- and then he was falling, knocked off his feet, bouncing off loose messes of scree and stunted shrubs, coming to rest flat on his back at the base of the rise. His pack came off somewhere above, and he’d left most of his breath behind on the ride down, and his lungs seemed deeply disinclined to help catch it back, full of something too thick to inhale around. He coughed hard, spat blood, and the pain lanced through his chest at last, finding its way around shock, and his head spun, hot and throbbing. He should, he knew, try to get up, try to run, try to do something, anything, but he couldn’t breathe.

From an impossibly vast distance, he heard someone sliding down the decline. It took all his strength to lift his head, to force his eyes to focus, Marcus striding toward him, and he felt it, felt it like he hadn’t in years, roaring up inside him with the blood bubbling in his throat, in his lungs, throbbing in his temples and in his gut: hunger. Hunger sharp and hard and hot, clawing at his insides, thrashing in his veins and flesh and soul. He dragged in a painful, rattling breath and croaked, “Stay...back. Please..stay…”

He coughed again, and the taste of his own blood in his mouth, on his tongue, on his teeth, made everything worse, sharper and harder and hotter, like throwing kerosene on a fire made of twisted metal and broken glass. It roared in him, that hunger, split his gums and the tips of his fingers, didn’t care that he had a monster-killing bullet in his chest, wanted to rip and rend and tear and Marcus was not fucking stopping.

“Please,” It came out warped and twisted, around his new teeth and new tongue, the straining of his jaw, but if his not-cousin heard the difference he made no sign of it. “Stay --”

“Don’t move.” A foot came down on his chest, pinned him back to the hardpack, sent a bolt of pain through him that, for an instant, briefly eclipsed all else. The cold barrel of the rifle rested against his forehead. “I told you. You shouldn’t have run.”