#bitchycollectionfury-78be5e8b

[benevolenterrancy]

@bitchycollectionfury-78be5e8b here ya go, thanks, this was fun to write ^-^ nice to write about people being dumber than you are to make yourself feel better

-

McCree was...

He was...

Well, he was definitely not panicking, that was what he was not doing, because Jesse McCree was one cool customer that could take things as they came and laugh it off.  He'd survived the foster care system and his weird adopted father and his overly intense adopted sister.  He'd survived losing his damn arm, alright, and everything that went down that made it necessary to bundle a young Jesse up and whisk him away to the houses of strangers rather than leave him at home.  And by the end, he'd survived everyone that had thought they could make judgment calls about him without even trying to get to know him, every teacher that had shaken their head and decided some idiots couldn't be helped, every classmate that had turned their nose up at his accent – a vestigial limb left over from a childhood in the south – or his manner of dress or his sense of humour.  After all, it hadn't been as bad as all that.  He'd wound up with a great family (he'd die for Gabe and Sombra), and plenty of friends.  He'd learnt to let people go.  Some people just would never see past his shaggy hair or his loud mouth or the cowboy hat he refused to “grow out of”.  Fuck 'em, that's what Jesse had learnt.  Shrug your shoulders, turn your back, and go find people that matter.  There had been a time when he couldn't do that.  There was a time when he'd been living back with his birth family that every disappointed look the teacher had sent him when he'd acted out in class had been like a slap and every report card returned home had been... well, not just like a slap.  There'd been a time when he'd hated everything about Gabriel Reyes, but mostly the fact that he was forcing him to confront a brand new school with people that stared and laughed and huddled among themselves in the cliques they'd formed years back, no space for a new, pushy, desperately loud kid.

Then things had changed.  Then he'd made friends, real friends, and found out what people could be like – what he could be like.  And suddenly the people turning their nose up didn't matter any more.

...R-ight.

And so that was why, as Jesse McCree sat in school library across from Hanzo Shimada, he definitely was not panicking at all.

Even if Hanzo Shimada was hot as sin, with long, dark hair cascading down his back, the most intense eyes Jesse has ever seen, and holy fuck those biceps.

The guy did archery apparently.  Archery. Who the fuck did archery unless they were preparing to run off in some goddamn fantasy movie?  Jesse had never even really given archery much thought as a thing people did – it only really existed in historical documentaries and the Olympics – but now when it was nearly thirty degrees outside and Hanzo Shimada was sitting two feet away from him in a tank top, Jesse was really, really thinking about archery.  And how it must take a lot of strength to constantly be drawing and holding a tense bowstring if you wanted to aim with any degree of accuracy.  And how that sort of strength made it look like your arms and shoulders had been carved from fucking marble.  Especially when one of said statuesque arms had a sleeve of vibrant, blue tattoos running all the way down it.  Jesse could get lost in a bicep like that, with or without blue dragons staring back at him, but the dragons definitely didn’t hurt.

The thing was though, it wasn't just that.  Jesse had met hot kids before that were out of his league and it generally didn't really trouble him.  Whatever, laugh it off, move on.  No, of course it had to be more complicated than that.  When Jesse had first entered this class he'd wound his way through the filling seats until he'd found himself sitting next to a boy whose name he would learn was Hanzo.  Jesse had then immediately had his smile met by a flat stare, and he'd figured, oh well, here was an uninteresting asshole.  A hot one, maybe, but an asshole all the same.  It hadn't seemed important at the time because he'd already turned to the person on his other side – a girl named Angela who apparently wanted to be a doctor (or a researcher...? Something like that, which involved more of the human body than Jesse wanted to think aobut).  She was friendly and laughed easily.

Everything would have been so much easier if Hanzo had just stayed an asshole. The guy was quiet, sure, but Jesse sat elbow-to-elbow with him three times a week and he slowly began to realize that underneath the prickly, don't-look-at-me-don't-speak-to-me aura the guy projected, there was something far sweeter down there.  The guy chuckled at every single one of the prof's bad jokes and Dr Winston had a lot of them, and they were always nonchalantly that most of the class didn't realize they'd happened... heck, Jesse usually didn't realize they'd happened until he heard a soft snort next to him.

(And yes, it was a snort. Absolutely and completely undignified and it made Jesse stare at Hanzo until he'd been glared back into submission by the man, who'd seemed flustered that someone had heard him.  How do you tell a guy that may or may not hate your guts just for existed that you thought his silly snort-laugh was cute?  The answer was you did not do that and focused back on your own notes if you value your life.)

As for Hanzo's notes, well, they were painfully neat and precise.  But amid the sharp ballpoint and careful diagrams, Hanzo Shimada apparently had a habit of making snide details about the lessons in the margins (Jesse knew this because it was a two hour long lecture and sometimes watching your neighbour writes notes out of the corner of your eye was better than trying to listen to a prof drone on at the front of the class for another hour and a half).  It made Jesse start fantasizing about taking out his own pen and writing a little comment in the corner of Hanzo's page.  Made him think about getting into some sort of stupid note-passing conversation with him like they were eight year olds rather than college kids.  Made him think about getting to have all those weird, witty little comments directed at him, and then seeing where the conversation took them.  (And, occasionally, it made him think about continuing that conversation out of class, possibly down towards a pub he knew for a chat and maybe, oh just maybe, a date.)

Jesse, however, did not dare try – to write the note, that is, entertaining anything else would have been madness.  Hanzo looked like the sort of person that might try to tear your head off if you messed up his notebooks.

Then, just to top it all off, during their lecture breaks, Hanzo often got calls from what Jesse could only assume was a brother.  And, against every expectation, Hanzo Shimada was sweet. Well, still a bit of a deadpan asshole, but no one who's a hundred percent bad uses his ten minutes of free time to talk with his brother every single day.

“Don't look at me, I am not playing wing-man for you in a class I need to ace if I wanna keep my GPA up,” Angela had said.  Jesse had pouted at that – he hadn't even gotten a chance to ask her, had just glanced at her with maybe a slightly-too-hopeful gleam in his eye during one of the breaks Hanzo had left the room to talk with his brother.

And then the fateful day of the class project had arrived.  Winston had told them just to group up with someone sitting beside them rather than running piecemeal through the class.  Jesse had, of course, turned to Angela only to find she had turned around in her seat and was quickly making plans to team up with a girl sitting behind them named Mei.

Frantically Jesse had spun around, but everyone else was making groups with the people to their left or right who they had been getting to know since day one.  With Angela breaking the system, that meant he had only one person left sitting next to him.

Hanzo Shimada was watching him with an unimpressed face and an eye brow raised.

Traitor, he mouthed at Angela.

You're welcome, mouthed Angela, the Stealth Wing-man.

And so here Jesse was, sitting in the library with someone who presumably hated his guts and thought he was – what, loud? Obnoxious? Lame? – but who Jesse still pathetically, wistfully wanted to impress.  Life, sometimes, was enormous unfair.  At this point Hanzo hadn't even given Jesse the time of day, he'd been sitting at one of the study tables since before Jesse had arrived, nose an inch from his phone as he texted someone.  Presumably someone cooler than Jesse McCree.

Jesse wanted to groan.  Or shove his pencil in his eye just so he could get out of this project.  Instead he mechanically started pulling out his books and waited for Hanzo to be ready to start on the project with him.

-

Hanzo Shimada: ... WELL??

Obnoxious Little Brother: oy give me a sec some of us are still in class and don't want our phone to be taken away again besides i'm trying to tell zen about how i, the lowly highschooler, am helping my university-bound brother pick up boys

Hanzo Shimada: Don't you DARE

Obnoxious Little Brother: too late he wishes you luck by the way and says he has complete faith in you goes to show which one of us  knows you better eh? not him!

Hanzo scowled down at his phone before he gaze flickered briefly up to the person who had sat across from him.  He'd been painfully aware of Jesse McCree since McCree had arrived in the library and pulled back the chair with a scrape that had made the hairs on the back of Hanzo's neck stand on end.  So far McCree had made no acknowledgment that there was another person at this table, another person he was going to be forced to work along side for the next two weeks.

Hanzo didn't know whether Zenyatta had faith in him or if Genji had just been trying to wind him up, but Hanzo certainly did not have faith in himself, not about this.  He had never been good at... people. He made, in Genji's words, “seriously just the worst first impressions.  Like wow.  So bad,” which just wasn't fair because when it came to a professional setting, when it was about work or networking, he was fine.  He could move effortlessly through the crowds, introduce himself, chat, plan, negotiate.  He'd been dogging his father's footsteps since it had been decided he would one day take over the family business and he was a devoted student.  But as soon as it was real people in real life Hanzo may as well be carved out of wood; somehow he always managed to put his foot in his mouth.  Which was why he had fallen so low as to turn to his baby brother for advice, because at least Genji, if nothing else could be said about him, was good with people.

Too good with people, if you asked their father.  Genji was a social butterfly who wasn't so much a butterfly as a housefly, flitting about around everywhere and getting where at lot of people would probably wish he wasn't and really not caring who he chatted with or what they thought about him.

Obnoxious Little Brother: look, just don't do the Hanzo Special and you should be fine

Hanzo Shimada: Excuse me??

Obnoxious Little Brother: u kno, your patented Grunt & Growl ™ technique don't do that and assume other people can actually understand you bc they can't

Hanzo wanted to snap back that he did not grunt or growl, thank you, he was a mature adult unlike Genji, but he found his fingers hesitating on the keys.  Frantically he scanned his memory to figure out if he had grunted or growled at Jesse McCree.

God help him he probably had.  He had almost certainly stared stupidly at him.

McCree... glowed, though, and Hanzo wasn't sure what to do with that.  He spoke so easily.  All it had taken was one glance from McCree on the first day of class for him to apparently decide that Hanzo was a lost cause.  Before Hanzo had managed to scrounge up a single coherent, reasonable thing to say to the sunshine bright, smiling boy who'd sat down next to him, said boy had turned his attentions to the much more receptive form of Angela Ziegler, the girl sitting to his right.

McCree was loud and raucous and ridiculous and he wore the stupidest hat Hanzo had ever seen but god help him he wanted to see McCree smile at him, rather than catch glimpse of it from the corner of his eye while he laughed with someone else.  He wanted to have McCree attention at some point other than when he'd made a fool of himself with his ugly laugh or by seeing McCree stare judgmentally at his notes.

Obnoxious Little Brother: at the risk of sounding too much like a disney movie have you tried just.... being yourself??? (this was zen's suggestion btw i'm personally pretty sure being someone other than yourself would be a step in the right direction but you never know maybe disney knows whats up)

Hanzo thought about what McCree had looked like when they had been forced to choose partners.  He had wanted to be anywhere than with Hanzo. The look he had shot Ziegler when she had found a different partner... the helpless, defeated look when he had accepted that the only person nearby not taken was Hanzo.

No, being himself was definitely not going to help him here.

Hanzo Shimada: Never mind I'll figure it out

What he was going to do was pretend that Jesse McCree was just some other random student, keep his head down, get this project done with the least amount of fuss, and move on to his next set of class next semester and hopefully forget that McCree existed.

“Shall we get started?” he asked briskly, pocketing his phone and pulling out his own book.

McCree's face was despondent and it sat like a stone in Hanzo's gut.  He would rather be anywhere than here.

“Might as well,” said McCree.

[ssaravinter]

I was wondering how much is the art book? I'm really thinking of buying it but I have to figure out if I can afford it or not. (Also I'll have to secretly order it so I don't get caught XD)

Hello there! I can’t give the exact information because the price hasn’t been set yet! But I’ll keep yall updated

thank you so much!

[benevolenterrancy]

@bitchycollectionfury-78be5e8b here’s Hanzo, the Great Pining Loser

(and genji thought his suffering would be done just because the fic’s over. Ha! I say, Ha!)

[benevolenterrancy]

tumblr is a completely functional website

there is no war in ba sing se

(i see your reply to my post ;) so no worries)