#its like a rat shaped advent calendar

[twobeesinatrenchcoat]

Second day of what I've decided now will be rat-cember. He also needs a name.

[solivar]

WIP: Matryoshka

A slice of life in Hong Kong.

Written for my dearest @exmachinus ‘ natal day. I’m afraid it’s going to have to be a fic in two parts, my fic-daughter, because my brain is running out of coherent sentences.

Hanzo Shimada was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and, frankly, is was driving Jesse McCree out of his goddamned mind.

For a significant number of years Jesse had cherished a rather fixed idea of who and what Hanzo Shimada was: the sort of man who, at the behest of his clan’s elders, would murder his own brother, then turn around and abandon the whole lot of them to their fate when Blackwatch came calling to end their criminal empire, scampering out ahead of a whole can of asswhup, only to turn up years later as one of the world’s best and most sought after and highly paid assassins, with corporate robber barons, corrupt military officials, and the heads of at least two fairly nasty and dysfunctional states on his confirmed resumé. A coldly self-interested bastard, in short, who valued nothing more highly than the sanctity of his own admittedly very pretty skin and the resources necessary to maintain it in the fashion to which it had become accustomed during his brief stint as kumicho of the Shimada-gumi. That idea had calcified over the years and settled into the bedrock of his preconceived notions with nothing to alter or dislodge it -- particularly not Genji Shimada, the aforementioned murdered brother plucked more dead than alive out of Hanamura and reconstructed as a moderately psychotic cyborg killing machine with knives for ankles and a seething hatred of his brother matched only by his seething hatred of himself, and certainly not the years he spent on the run after the fall of the ‘Watches, trying to avoid the sort of attention that would shorten his own lifespan rather significantly.

At some point in there, though, Genji found religion. Or he found himself. Or he found religion and himself and, upon doing so, decided that he didn’t really want the brother who had wronged him so profoundly dead any longer. Jesse could respect that in a man. Revenge was the sort of vice that lacked any meaningful step-down program and learning that his dearest friend, his brother in all but blood, had decided to forgo it for his own emotional and spiritual good was entirely understandable. Less entirely understandable? When he found himself looking at a combination contractual/emotional blackmail agreement under which he found himself relocating to Hong Kong to act as the bodyguard for said stone-cold snake/coldblooded assassin brother.

The least comprehensible part of all?

The moment he watched Hanzo Shimada, startlingly hot ice-cold rat-bastard, hurrying across the lobby of the ritzy arcology complex in which they lived to help one of his little old lady neighbors with her shopping bags, a thing he seemed to do on the regular. Regularly enough that she greeted him by name -- not his real name, of course, but Kira Ishinomori, the alias he used to all his neighbors and to Jesse himself -- and patted his arm and called him a good boy and gave his hulking giant of an American boyfriend the stink-eye when he came over to help. Hanzo/Kira’s neighbors were more or less evenly split among those who thought that Jesse/Jesse was the best possible thing that could happen to their shy and withdrawn neighbor who clearly wasn’t actually a serial killer despite his weird habit of disappearing at random in the middle of the night and those who wanted him to walk off a balcony in the dark and fall thirty stories to his death because they had cherished some hope of setting said neighbor up with one or more of their grandchildren. Mrs. Takaguchi-Simmons was one of the latter and regarded him with baleful disfavor even as he helped hump approximately six thousand pounds of groceries up five flights of stairs because the lifts were acting up again.

Hanzo/Kira’s neighbors would, each and every one, flatly refuse to believe that he had ever been a gangster-lord, a brother-murdering kinslayer, or was currently a professional assassin, even if they were shown incontrovertible evidence to the contrary -- which, as a matter of fact, they saw at least semi-regularly in the form of elaborate ink because the man didn’t always wear button-down sleeves. Hanzo/Kira was the sort who, when he knew a neighbor or a neighbor’s child was sick, would turn up on the doorstep with a pot of warm okayu and another pot of tea and would sit with the invalid while they ate and do the dishes afterwards. Hanzo/Kira always remembered birthdays and anniversaries -- Jesse knew because Toshokan-in’s calendar was full of reminders -- and he always bought or made at least a card and usually acquired some small but appropriate gift, as well. Hanzo/Kira was respectful of and helpful to his elderly neighbors with the reflexive deference of someone raised from the cradle to honor his elders, even the immensely crotchety Old Man Zheng, who had been the leading proponent of the serial killer explanation for his erratic comings and goings and who had lost quite a bit of money in the arcology betting pool when Jesse showed up to disprove it. Hanzo/Kira could occasionally be found sitting on the balcony smiling wistfully over the antics of the neighborhood children and slipping them candy and small bits of spending money when their parents weren’t looking. Hanzo/Kira interrogated him with immense casualness about his likes and dislikes, the things he preferred and those he merely endured, somehow sussed out his birthday from that information and baked him a cake, bought him a box of his favorite cigars and a fifty year old bottle of bourbon, and watched a John Ford movie marathon with him as they snuggled down together on the kotatsu and got happily shitfaced on forty-thousand dollar hooch.

Jesse was having significant quantities of trouble believing it himself and he knew every bit of it was true. Had trouble since the moment they’d met, when Hanzo/Kira had swooped out of nowhere to literally step on the heads of obnoxious punks causing him grief and seriously testing his desire to avoid attention from local law enforcement. Had trouble since that first morning/afternoon when Hanzo/Kira had floated the obvious explanation for his sudden advent with the word lovers and then took to cultivating the appearance with enthusiasm and verve. Had trouble because nowadays he was waking up every morning with his arms and head and heart all full of him and, oh, was he ever fucked.

Flickers of the sort of cold he’d expected from the start showed through every now and again, but they were few and far between. The most obvious and most persistent was the spare bedroom he’d turned into a walk-in storage and manufacture closet for his weapons, protected from accidental access by its own security system, to which he’d only been permitted entry once, and he had come out with a cold shiver lodged in the base of his spine that had refused to thaw all day. Hanzo/Kira had not, to his knowledge, accepted any side contracts since taking him in, ostensibly to protect him from his numerous enemies both real and fictional. Jesse was legitimately unsure of what he’d do or say if he did, since at least some of the proceeds from that particular profession were fueling his current lifestyle, which involved eating delicious food prepared by a man who really knew how to cook, drinking the best class of booze he had enjoyed in many a long year, indulging his favorite old hobby (photography) and his favorite new hobby (lounging in the sun smoking and playing endless games of Mah Jong with two salty old men), updating Joel Morricone’s blog on a significantly more regular basis, and sleeping safe and warm in the arms of a man who could probably kill him with his toes alone.

(“How much of this comes from…” He’d begun to ask one day only to come to a halt when one of those flickers of cold happened -- Kira’s warm amber-brown eyes icing over and his face going utterly still and he knew he was looking on the last thing at least a few people in the world had ever seen.

“My day job?” Hanzo Shimada had asked, and the silky-cold smoothness of it had sent a chill rolling down his back. “Less than you might think. If it bothers you --”

“Oh no. No. I was just --” He reached over the breakfast table and caught his hand. “A li’l curious, is all.”

“Ah.” A little smile twitched at the corner of his mouth and a certain impish gleam came into his eyes and the cold was gone just like that. “To be honest, before I left Japan I extracted my entire trust fund and moved it into an anonymous offshore account. Genji’s, as well. Once matters settled enough to allow it, I laundered it through a number of different operations, and placed most of it in a highly diversified investment portfolio. I have been living off the proceeds ever since.” He picked up and nibbled at an apricot. “Honestly, the first goal of any Yakuza worth the name is extracting as much profit as possible from any enterprise in which he involves himself. You have no idea how close I am to being a CPA.”

“So, uh,” Jesse had asked, “why the killin’ people?”

“Some people deserve to die,” Had replied Hanzo Shimada and Jesse fell a little bit more in love than he’d been before.)

And, yes, he was in love. Deeply, fucking stupidly in love, with his best friend’s big brother, with whom he was sleeping nightly, chastely, platonically. And it was killing him. Killing him dead. It was not only that he was hotter than the photosphere of the sun, all warm golden eyes and silver-threaded black hair and regal aquiline features you’d find in paintings of Heian court noblemen and a body kept in shape through regular exercise that did not partake of the hellborn abomination known as jogging. It was not only that he seemed perpetually bathed in a gentle, intoxicating blend of cedar-cinnamon-sandalwood-spice that invaded the senses and worked its way into his dreams and likely was the sort of thing that would make men far straighter than himself seriously question their sexuality. It was absolutely not only the cooking.

It was a blend of all the things he’d show himself to be since he’d come into Jesse’s life, or Jesse had come into his, and Jesse was absolutely, one hundred percent certain that Hanzo or Kira or Hanzo and Kira recognized absolutely none of them, because the man could, transparently, only barely stand to live in his own skin.

He had come upon the knowledge, randomly and unexpectedly, in the dead of night, when he was woken from a deep and dreamless sleep by the desperate, pained whimpers of an animal with its leg caught in a trap. Or, at least that’s what he thought it was, as his mind swam up from the depths, and then crashed into reality, which was a cold spot at his side that Hanzo usually occupied and sounds that were half-words and half-not, emanating from where he lay curled around himself at the edge of the bed.

“Kira?” Jesse had asked, thoughts fuzzy and muddled with sleep and then, when some of what the man whispering, over and over like a panic mantra, made its way through, “Hanzo?”

He hadn’t responded, except to curl up tighter and sob aloud, words in Japanese he wished he didn’t know but did, from experiences similar. It had taken him awhile to bring him back down, with soft words and gentle touches, and in the morning he had still been quiet and withdrawn. Kira had spent the next few days making a good attempt at being the Best Human Ever, with not a single glimpse of Hanzo peeking through, not matter how alone they were. Jesse had spent them mulling over the knowledge that, even though Genji was alive and had granted his forgiveness freely, Genji’s brother didn’t think he deserved it and still dreamt of why. Spent even more thinking of Kira and of Hanzo and whether or not Hanzo realized they weren’t two different people, not a role and a real person, but one whole being, because nobody, no matter how dedicated they were to verisimilitude, actually bothered to make friends with other people’s kids unless he really enjoyed it, or made his best girl friend a medicinal rub to make her nasty asshole granddaddy less unbearable, or behaved like a basically decent human as completely and reflexively as he did without actually being one. Wondered if there were anything he could do to make him see it, or believe it.

*