#he's got a cybernetic jaw that's only cybernetic from the inside but he can unhinge that whole thing

[ruvviks]

new cyberpunk blorbo has a name a picrew and a pinterest board it's so over (we're so back)

[theotherjax]

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

This really seriously got away from me, and thank fuck for that.

Under the cut: Overwatch, Pre-Fall, young!Fareeha and Genji, talk of cybernetics, prosthetic parts being taken off and wobbly in case that needs a warning. Also rampant posthumanism but I guess that’s a matter of perspective.

They weren’t really a family. It was a nice sentiment, and they bandied it about during the good times, when all the pieces seemed together to make something more in the whole. But put together any collection of oddities and there would be that want, to belong with the belongingless, and all of them were sharp enough to know it. It made encounters shoot sparks sometimes when exposed wires were forced to brush too close in the hope of completing a circuit. They wanted, but they weren’t really family, because there wasn’t really intimacy about it when they were all busy trying to turn their oddities into heroism before the whole world.

t took a particular kind of intimacy to have someone walk in on you when your face was off. Genji did not have that intimacy with Fareeha Amari, age fifteen.

Technically speaking, Genji’s lower jaw wasn’t even supposed to come off outside of upgrades or heavy maintenance. He must have been exceptionally drunk to do it, and in possession of tools one should not possess while exceptionally drunk. Or perhaps it was McCree who actually did the unhinging, because he was certain it had been McCree’s idea to test whether Genji could remote-taste things through his artificial palate when it wasn’t all in one piece. Genji couldn’t strictly taste anything to begin with - he had certain chemical sniffers, but the signals they fired translated to salt present, not salty. But he had been exceptionally drunk and figured the worst thing that could happen was accidentally poisoning himself, which was of course a weak deterrent. So now his chemical sniffers were pitching little fits at the quantity of ethanol soaked into their bedding in his tongue, and he was too damn hungover to lock the screws in his jaw hinge right, and a teenage girl in a set of slacks nicked from his commanding officer was staring at him from his doorway, looking like she was going to need her own jaw screwed properly on again.

“Didn’t your mother teach you to knock?” Genji snapped, feeling everything in his skull rattle a little out of alignment.

Fareeha went as hot a red as her brown complexion showed and seemed to shrink just a bit further into Commander Reyes’ black hoodie. She was at that gangly stage where everything her body did unwillingly showed. “I, um, I was knocking and the door wasn’t, it just opened.”

“I always lock the door.”

“Well you, didn’t last night. Maybe because you and Jesse, um, he said I should check you’re okay - “

“Tell him to fuck off.” Genji’s English was still heavily accented, and worse when he didn’t have full control of his mouth, but he had learned to enunciate very specific words.

Fareeha twitched. A gesture wrung between the shrinking cringe that came form being fifteen, and the jerking up of her chin that came from being Fareeha Amari. Genji didn’t wait to see which would win out. He whipped to his feet and walked up to the door, hand already held out to slam it shut.

Fareeha’s eyes widened. Then, inches from his hand to the door, she mumbled, “Ya Allah, that is really cool.”

Genji froze - not because he was flattered, not because he was surprised that she didn’t back off, but because he realized she wasn’t looking at his face. His chest. His armour was entirely off. Fareeha had probably never seen him that dismantled before. The metal that clasped his throat, the intricate circuitry woven around his ribs, down to the lining of the cartridges along his prosthetic arm, the glowing self-monitoring readouts on the synthetic mesh of his stomach - “If it’s ‘so cool’,” he snarled at her, with venom he couldn’t possibly give his superiors or fellow soldiers,  “why don’t you try it?”

“I would if I could!”

They weren’t really a family, and so Genji only knew from rumours, from McCree’s gabbing, that Fareeha wasn’t the most interpersonally astute girl around. McCree’s common description - fond, but as patronizing as only one kid could be to another - was “a huge dweeb”. A strange shoot grown in strange soil, in Overwatch. But this was extreme.

She was fifteen. He was a cybernetically enhanced assassin. He couldn’t slap her.

“I mean, it’s strictly medical technology,” Fareeha continued, a huge dweeb, not picking up on his shocked seething rage. Or possibly the chin-jerk had won out after all. “Angela said so. But maybe by the time I enlist some of the stuff would be available as an elective upgrade. Like ummi’s eye? You know she volunteered to test it out when she - “

“I didn’t volunteer,” Genji said, so tightly he thought the screws in his jaw might lock themselves.

“I know. Just - “ finally, finally, a thunderstruck look descended upon Fareeha’s face and shoulders. She looked a little gray, or perhaps green. “I - that was really stupid, I’m sorry, even for an idiot like me that was really, it’s just that this is so - “ 

She raised a hand, young and ill-fitting and half-finished, in a vague longing gesture at the chrome and steel of him.  

Genji took a steadying breath. He’d been finding those hard ever since vents and pumps had become involved. Being able to see the internal state of his body displayed in digital red at any given second on what passed for his skin was also no help. He wanted to tell her to get out of there. He wanted to tell her that this wasn’t what he dreamed about getting when he was growing up into himself. He half-turned and gritted out, “your mother will not approve.”

It was a fatal mistake. Even without looking, he could feel Fareeha’s presence expand, feel her self strain at the seams of her awkward youth. “Mother won’t approve of anything I want to do.”

“And you should listen! This is not a game, it is not “cool”! This is my body!” Despite himself he threw those words at her feet, at her face, his living hand flashing down the cold dead length of him, look, take a good look! “No one wants this!”

Fareeha took a step back. She looked mortified. He felt the memory of bile at the back of his throat - no real bile anymore - at the look he always read as pity. She was fifteen, she wasn’t a child. He could reach out and grab the back of her oversized hoodie and shake her inside it and make her look -

He hadn’t realized how fast he moved until realizing that she had tried to counter him, that the tears in her eyes were a reflex response to the collision of her bare wrist against the metal of his arm. She might have succeeded, if he had only been a man. Through all her disapproval her mother had trained her well. It occurred to him then that Ana would not truly stop her daughter from anything, not even this, if Fareeha truly wanted it. The ones who loved her would back her to the end. The stress alarms floating in his artificial vision rose bright red, and he could feel his systems begin to hum into battle mode, preparing endorphins, stimulants, coolant, everything he needed to be rendered calm and precise.

“I’m sorry!” Fareeha burst, even as she planted her feet down into a defensive combat pose. “I’m sorry this happened to you, I’m sorry I always say the wrong thing! I know you hate it, I just, I do want this. For my body. I want to be fast, strong - faster and stronger than anyone!”

“You want to be a weapon?!”

“I want to be a soldier!”

Genji let her go. She didn’t even slump, just settled, brittle but instantly braced, as straight-backed as her growing bones could make her. 

“You’re a child,” Genji said, with more weariness than disgust. I was also a child. They didn’t care. “You don’t know what you want.”

A fatal mistake. Again. When he looked back at her she looked him in the eye. “This is my body,” she said again. “It’s about doing what I want. I - Angela thought you’d understand.”

Genji closed his eyes. “Angela didn’t ask what I wanted.”

“She said you were going to die,” Fareeha answered, “and that dead people can’t make choices.”

It was the most Angela thing Genji had heard in over a year of actually knowing Angela; and at the same time it was all of Overwatch, Ana with her cutting wisdom, Morrison with his do-your-damn-job grit, Reyes with his unrelenting faith in change, in possibility. All of it rolled up into this girl that grew up in this collection of oddities that wasn’t really a family. Genji’s heart spasmed through the battle prep. He tightened his jaw.

His jaw made a creaking noise, and a screw popped out of the hinge.

Fareeha made a strangled noise that was quite possibly a word Ana wasn’t supposed to know she knew. 

Genji considered his options. He could initiate system shutdown and attempt to die on the spot. He could fly into a rage that would definitely end with him having to explain the set of circumstances to Reyes, if not, worse, to Ana. Or he could…

Fuck.

He had to reach out and realign his jaw, and keep a hand up to keep it realigned as he spoke. “You fucked it up, so you come help me fix it properly.”

Her eyes lit up. Maybe it was his third fatal mistake of the day. Maybe instead of showing her the horror of it - of having to have a part of you fixed, worked on with pliers and a screwdriver - he was encouraging her, whatever her fantasies were, of being gleaming, impervious, easy to repair. But his head hurt too badly to care now, he just wanted to be in one piece again. Let Ana work it out of her system, or age. Age would do it. No one really wanted to grow up to all changed, all remade.

He let the door drift open, and Fareeha followed him gingerly into the room. She pulled out a stool next to the bed as he dropped onto it and groaned at Athena to dim the lights. Her lips pursed.

“Angela told me you can switch off hangovers if you want,” she said, almost like it was a dare.

Genji shook his head, though it made his vision swim. “They make me feel human.”

Fareeha looked down at her hand. She was holding the loose screw between a thumb and forefinger, rolling it carefully. Her eyes passed between it and him. “I guess I understand,” she said, in a tone that said she didn’t really, but would try to for his sake. Maybe it was fine for now, Genji thought. Maybe it was the first step…

That is really cool

“Come on.” He turned his head to let her see what was unfinished in him. “Let’s get this over with.”