#Shambali intensifies | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sunstriderling · 7 years ago

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Since we're on the topic of Hanzo and you offering to write any fic, how do you feel about a Blind!Hanzo AU? Idk i just finished Avatar the last airbender and Toph's seismic sense helping with her blindness was an insp for this idea.

[Widowmaker voice]: what’s an AU

( AO3 )

Snow flurries across the abandoned temple’s courtyard. In the moonlight, it’s barely more than a whisp like a spirit scurrying down the cliff, scattering as the ground vanishes from beneath it and the wind carries the icy particles into the valley below. Genji shudders - everything here seems so different now. Distorted, somehow, now that the Shambali no longer light the fires at night.

He slides his katana out of its saya, its edge pulsing with its low neon glow against the blue of the snow gathered over the tiled ground. He tilts his head as he walks silently forwards, listening to the idle static carrying through his communications link: this far up, no one can hear him, and he can’t hear anyone.

Good. Whatever hides here, he’d rather face on his own.

The doors are broken, and even the entrance to the shrine has over time filled with snow. It’s gathered into the corners and spread like a carpet over the floor leading forwards from the doorway. Genji’s footsteps leave marks over it as he heads left, passing down the stairs he used to know quite well but which now lead into pitch black darkness instead of the warm glow of torches and the sounds of prayer, of wind chimes and the bells carried by the monks.

He can still hear speech, however. As his visor adjusts to the low levels of light around him, easing it for his eyes to adapt as well, he searches for the source. It seems to come from the room above the pit, so he heads there, feet light and his hurried steps barely making a sound.

Talon agents. He can see them, huddled around a light source, with… pieces of an omnic in their midst. Not a monk, Genji notes at first - looks like some Bastion model. He doesn’t know why they’re here, nor does he particularly care; his instructions were clear. Seek, destroy.

Just like the good old times.

A smirk pushes its way onto his lips, a breath carrying out the vents of his mask. Damn, he thinks; it’s been too long since he had a good one-on-five. With the advantage of surprise on him, his form flashes into the room. There are yelps, and then gunfire; a bullet bounces off the armour on his shoulder, scrapes the side of his head with a sound like fabric tearing, but it barely concerns him. His visor dims the contrast and prevents the following blindness after each gunshot flashes the room with white, and effortlessly, he bouncs back into the darkness, blood dripping off his sword.

Don’t kill if you don’t have to, he reminds himself; Waste of life is beneath you.

One of the agents crouches on the floor, holding a bleeding gash on his side.

“They’ll come get you later,” Genji promises him under his breath, his form melting into a black corner of the hall as his enemy points lights around in a disorganized manner, trying to find him there. “You will have justice - as long as you stay down, of course.”

A light bounces off his form, and with his frame’s power system flaring to light, he charges out of the bullet spray that follows. He lands lightly onto the platform - the heart of the shrine - in the middle, and vanishes inside the altar room beside it. His heart beats with excitement as he hears the agents following him, shouting orders that echo from the endlessly high ceiling and drop like stones down into the pit below. When they step there, he raises his katana again, lifts it before him, and speaks a low prayer into the thick silence of the room that conceals him. Then, with the glow of his body intensifying, he charges out and strikes. One, two - three out of five down. He turns for the fourth, but then, something catches his sight on the walls separating the platform from the corridors. A dark shape that doesn’t belong there, crouching over the edge. He turns towards it, preparing a blow, but the sky blue sash dancing in the draft stills him - stuns him, just for long enough for a bullet to hit where it hurts.

A muffled sound escapes him as the impact tears apart the underside of his shoulder blade, digging into the artificial muscles of his arm and chest. He stumbles forwards, lands on one knee, and twists around to deflect a bullet; it changes course, hits the wall and scatters down a rain of dust and grit. His focus seems as splintered; his systems suppress the pain quickly enough, the information spreading at the edges of his vision a confirmation that the injury would not prevent him from carrying on the fight, and he can see his enemies taking aim again, a woman on one side and a man on the other, but -

there is one at his back, a ghost, an apparition from his past that cannot and would not be here, even if, even… if -

The woman falls first. There’s a flash of blue, like the darkness has fractured and revealed from beneath the brightest shade of sunlit clear skies, and then a splatter of blood from her neck, a spray of it, that turns to a flow like a black river down her throat and into the deepening dark of her uniform. Genji’s katana falters, falling an inch or so from the position his deflection left it at, and he turns towards the man taking aim up now, and a strange calm sense of expectation, like waiting for something quite natural to happen, settles into him.

Another blue flash punctures the man’s skull through his forehead. He collapses backwards, the light of his weapon falling like a beacon down to the floor.

A silence consumes the shrine once more. Genji, his body’s neon glow pulsing gently as his systems stabilize, stands up and turns to face the man now standing up on the wall. He looks at him properly now, the way he slides his bow back around his body and then crouches down, fingers sliding along the wall’s edge as if to mark it down. Then, his body slides smoothly down from it, and he lands like a cat on his feet, silently, with the blue sash filling up with air and then falling back to his side just barely grazing the dusty floor.

“Hanzo.”

“An unlikely place for us to meet again,” the older brother says, his voice concealing any emotion that might burn behind it.

Genji watches his fingertips move over the golden cloth covering his eyes, brushing over it as if to make sure it’s still there. Slowly, the cyborg moves closer - he lets his feet make sound this time, allows the soft pads to meet the ground carelessly enough to cause the quietest of echoes through the space.

“What have the years done to you?” he asks, lifting his hand between them; it stays there, shaking ever so slightly, until Hanzo’s meets it in the middle, his fingers sliding between the metallic joints and brushing against the touch-sensitive pads on the underside.

“Not the years,” he answers in a calm, if a little melancholic tone; “Bad choices.”

Genji lets him run his palm down his own, lets his fingertips seek out the edges of each part of his hand, then his wrist, and from there reach up to his mask. There, he moves in himself; this time, his hands are clearly shaking as he lets his visor down, breaks it off the frames, and reveals the upper half of his face from beneath.

The world is suddenly much darker, even for his enhanced eyesight, but Hanzo’s touch is light as it travels down the bridge of his nose and up the curves of his brows. Finally, the other man retreats his hand.

“Bad choices, huh?” he repeats, his tone as shaky as his hands, “I haven’t seen you since the war started. I thought you dead.”

“Returning the favour has been my pleasure.”

“So this is all just a measure of revenge?” Genji asks, grimace tinting his voice now.

Hanzo chuckles. He lowers his head, his overgrown hair falling over his features, tangling up with the cloth over his eyes.“I never did know how to give you an answer to the question you never asked me,” he says then.

Genji swallows.“So you said nothing instead.”

“Precisely.”

“You are an idiot,” Genji snarls.He brings his hand up to Hanzo’s face, presses his fingertip against the edge of the cloth, and pushes down with only implicit pressure. Hanzo cocks his head, his hair falling back off it, and slips his fingertips under the cloth; when he removes it, the scarring underneath reminds Genji of a broken cobweb.

“What happened?” he asks again.

“The war happened.”

The blindfold falls loose and silky over Hanzo’s fingertips, and his hand fists around it, tucks it underneath the sash on his waist.

“And yet you are here,” Genji points out, “Yet you saved my life.”

“Your life needed no saving before you spotted me. All I did was prevent my own carelessness from harming the enemy of my enemy.”

“So that is what I have become - the enemy of your enemy.”

The older brother smiles, his head bowing down again.

“I will not ask you how you did it. You clearly will not tell me. Good - we will both have our secrets, then,” Genji sighs.

“Then what will you ask?”

A low, breathless chuckle escapes Genji.“Still sharp, aren’t you.”

“I have to be. Now more than ever,” Hanzo says, the smile on him turning crooked as he tilts his head, “Speak it - the life you spared is bleeding out, and without him, your allies will never have the answers they sent you here to seek.”

“Very well, then. No more small talk.”

Genji watches Hanzo for a moment, his heart now beating out of nerves rather than the fading adrenaline of the fight. Regardless, it still beats - a fact ensured by the phantom before him.

“You said you never knew what answer to give me,” he begins then, and Hanzo lifts his head, a sliver of white peeking from underneath his scarred lids, “All I ask now is whether you still want an answer, and if you would let me give it to you, should you still feel that you cannot find it on your own.”

The man before him lets out a breathless, yet amused - perhaps relieved - chuckle. He turns his head towards the fall beside them, his gloved fingers sliding down the side of his hip.

“What use would a blind man be to you?” he asks.

“What use is the sky to the earth?”

“I am nothing, Genji.”

“You are still my brother.”

In the silence that falls between them, the halls echo with the wind’s howl. It sounds like an endless exhale pushing against the mouth of a bottle, and its vibrations ache inside Genji’s auditory channels. Finally, Hanzo nods.

“Tell me then, my kin - what is my fate?”

“To follow me back down, where I hope a warm breakfast will end this night for us both. You look like you could use that.”

The next smile on the older spreads warmer, wider than the one before. Sighing, he pulls out his blindfold again and slides it over his features, his fingers tugging his hair out from beneath it and then untangling his hand from amongst the uneven locks.

“You ask for very little,” he says.

“What did you expect me to ask of you? An empire, the world, your soul? All I wish for is for us to walk this path together once more, brother; whichever way you would.”

The other’s smile trembles, but he hides it behind his palm, his fingers running over the corners of his mouth and down the greying beard covering his chin. He turns towards the room where the bleeding man must still be waiting, and Genji watches him breathe as he returns his visor over his own features, bringing back the desaturated glow into the room.

“Lead me, then,” Hanzo finally says, “Perhaps I am finally ready to follow.”

#shimada brothers #hanzo #genji #overwatch #fic #mine #anon #replies

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