Chapter Text
“I feel sick,” Baptiste groaned for the fourth time, throwing his head back to hit the headrest.
“Stop looking at your phone,” Akande said. His eyes remained trained on the road as they drove, but he looked moments away from reaching back to take Baptiste’s phone from him. “You’ll only make yourself feel worse.”
“Shimada, can you open the window?”
“I already have.”
“Can you open it fully?”
“No.”
Baptiste grumbled something under his breath. Sighing, Hanzo opened the window a little more, hoping that the concession would mean Baptiste wouldn’t puke on him.
“There’s only a few more minutes until we reach the rest stop,” Akande told Baptiste. “Just stop looking at your phone until then and if you need to puke, you can puke there.”
“We should have just taken the train,” Baptiste said. “The flight was bad enough, why would we willingly stuff ourselves into a car after that?”
Hanzo bit back a sigh. The car was large, luxurious, and comfortable, but that did not seem to stop Baptiste from complaining. Akande had not mentioned that the man experienced motion sickness (a strange quality for someone climbing the ranks of a criminal organisation, Hanzo privately thought), and it appeared that Baptiste was too committed to talking to whoever he was texting to stop staring at him phone.
“A few more minutes,” Akande repeated.
They drove in silence for a while, the radio playing an unfamiliar indie song as background noise. Hanzo stared out of the window and watched trees and cars zip by, feeling giddy at his escape. The Shimada family believed him to be dead, after a complex plan to make him appear to have been assassinated by an angry member of the Hiroshigo family, alongside Genji. The Shimada family had been furious, and embarked on a mission to destroy the family entirely, and Hanzo and Genji had been able to slip through the chaos unnoticed.
As glad as Hanzo was that Genji was travelling the world and ‘finding himself’, he couldn’t help but miss his younger brother. He had asked if Genji would join Talon with him and he had adamantly refused, but promised to keep in contact. Hanzo had hoped, with the pressures of the elders’ expectations swept aside, he would have the chance to grow closer to his brother, but it seemed that would not be so.
Still, his future now was not as bleak as it was a month ago. Hanzo would have the freedom to do as he wished as well as the satisfaction of his work as an assassin. All whilst working alongside Akande. It seemed too good to be true, and it was with no small amount of effort that Hanzo brushed away the paranoia that it would crash down at his feet as soon as he grew comfortable.
“We’re here,” Akande announced.
“Thank God,” Baptiste muttered, not waiting for either of the men as he threw himself out of the car and ambled towards the collection of stores. Hanzo undid his seatbelt and made to exit the car, but Akande’s hand on his arm made him pause.
“Are you okay?” Akande asked, his voice unbearably gentle. “You seem quiet.”
Hanzo could not stop the smile forming on his face, touched by the man’s genuine concern. “I’m fine. Just thinking.”
“What’s on your mind, love?” Akande asked.
“I… do not dread the future. That is something new to accustom myself to.”
Akande brushed his thumb across Hanzo’s cheekbone fondly. “You deserve a happy future. Maybe one day we can buy a cottage in the countryside and grow strawberries to sell at the farmers’ market.”
Hanzo snorted. “I was born and raised to be an assassin, I doubt the strawberries will hold my attention for long.”
“That is probably not a future for people like us,” Akande agreed, chuckling at the thought. “Still, you know that I would do anything to make you happy, right?”
“You have already done that,” Hanzo said. “I don’t think I have been this happy in a long while.”
“You deserve it,” Akande said, tugging Hanzo’s mask down momentarily to steal a kiss.
“I’m not sure I do,” Hanzo admitted. He tugged his mask up, partly to prevent being recognised as a man who was supposed to be dead, and partly to conceal the blush that Akande had ignited. “I want to believe it, but…”
“You will understand one day,” Akande said fondly. “Come on, I’m craving something sweet from Starbucks.”