Work Text:
One two three four five six, reload, roll, aim again.
Gunshots ring out across the desert landscape, only some of them McCree's. He breathes smoke and feels a familiar taut ache in his shoulder, a fog in his brain. This fight has gone on for too long. He’s getting tired, and fast.
One two three four five - wait, where'd they go?
There's an outlaw hiding somewhere behind that freight-train car, unaware of his shadow stretching over dead grass. After a single gunshot, the body joins its shadow on the ground.
Reload. Go.
The sun burns like lashes on every inch of exposed skin, and part of McCree hates the desert now that all its majesty is scorched away. He'll love it again come sundown when everything is red and quiet - if he’s still alive to see it then. Here and now he listens for footsteps or rough voices, swearing under his breath that the dry earth should crack open and swallow them whole.
Someone moves, brown grass rustling, and McCree turns -
One two three four.
Another man dead, all the redness inside him feeding into the ground.
Five six. McCree places just a couple more shots in his back for good measure and safety’s sake.
Reload. To survive out here you need to know which risks to take and which to avoid. And you need to know how to be quiet -
One two three shots ring out. The man who now lies dead was not quiet, but ran for the hills with breath loud as thunder to McCree's trained ears.
Then there are two shots fired from a gun that isn't McCree's Peacekeeper. The last living member of the godforsaken gang crouches in the shade of a heap of metal by the side of a sorry excuse for train tracks. His leg is injured, dragging after him. As the wounded animal he is, he stares at McCree and begs wordlessly for mercy.
To survive out here you need to know that there is never any mercy to be had.
Just as McCree comes close enough, the injured man raises his revolver one last time with desperate, blank eyes. He struggles to fill his lungs with air, heaving dust. He wastes no time aiming, pulling the trigger at once, and he could have hit McCree right between the eyes, then.
There’s a sad, hollow click. No more bullets.
Because there's one last, important skill: You need to be able to count to six. McCree smiles at him and raises his own gun, pointing it right at the poor lad's head. Knowing that he won't always get to count to the end, McCree is glad to have survived today. The last four-five-six sound as a quick triumph that echoes in the canyon.
Hanzo is aware of the sound of his own footsteps as he hurries down the hallway. He is aware of his assailants, of shadows and guns cocked and swords slicing through the air. Yet he does not dwell on the fact that there are enemies here. He forces himself not to, repeating an old mantra about being a still lake, focusing on himself.
Draw the bow back - breathe, aim - and let go of the arrow. Let it fly.
It hits a man and silences him, stop him dead in his tracks. Hanzo does not know how many there are or how many arrows he has left; it does not matter. When he runs out of arrows he will use his hands and feet, and if there are too many enemies for him to fight even then, worrying is useless.
He kneels at a corner. The Japanese-style house is composed of a hallway surrounding small, rectangular rooms divided by paper screens, and he senses the presence of many people on the other side of this thin wall. It must be the main room of the house, outfitted for formal receptions like in an old Edo castle. Typical for his family. The whole building is like a heritage site. He moves through it like a shadow in every crevice and hiding place, camouflaged, equally rooted in that bygone time. He fits in next to the faded paintings of bamboo groves and the worn-down furniture from a by-gone age.
The intruders are easy to spot, giving Hanzo yet another advantage. He now has the element of surprise - a deep breath, a moment with the bowstring extended – and the dragons.
They burst forth as the arrow flies.
Bright like summer skies, the dragons come easily as an extension of his body and will and bow. They tear through the paper screens and the people behind them as Hanzo once tore through grass and flower wreaths when he struggled with controlling the spirits. When he was smaller, younger, still fighting them as they would spiral away or refuse his call completely. Only now do they understand each other. The dragons have settled for him, Hanzo thinks, and now they’re reliable and safe and still sending this feeling like electricity running up his arms and down his spine – he tells himself he doesn’t miss the struggle. The excitement. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter to him.
All that matters is that he is here, the bodies on the floor do not move, and there yet more are footsteps in the corridor.
Draw the bow back - wait, breathe, wait for him to come through the door with his gun up and then - aim - the arrow flies, piercing a skull.
He should move on now, but he stops and looks down at the body. The crushed bone. The blood seeping into the wooden floor.
The house is silent.
Breathe and let go.
"A different time..." Hanzo says, talking out loud to no one but the empty suit of armour on the dais.
A time of samurai and dragons and honour long-gone haunts the house even after his dragon-spirits have roared and swept on through it.
McCree has the sun in his eyes, but tries to stare down the stranger anyway.
They stand opposite one another, still with the uneasy posture of strangers forced together by circumstance. McCree’s arms are folded across his chest, half-hidden by his poncho. His hat is pulled down so that his face is mostly shadow. He’s glad that’s the case. It hides a faint blush.
Because Hanzo is strikingly different in any crowd and it is just the kind of unique that McCree likes. The other man looks like a samurai, all bright colours and something McCree is pretty sure is called a kimono. Maybe. It’s Japanese; that’s as much as he can tell.
”Why are you wearing that?" Hanzo asks.
"Hell,” McCree says, ”I wanna ask you the same question right back.”
Hanzo looks down like he only now realizes he isn’t wearing jeans and a t-shirt. ”This?”
McCree nods.
”I don’t have to explain myself,” Hanzo says.
”It's not that hard. I just like the look of a cowboy hat,” McCree replies, adding a flourish.
”How old-fashioned.” Hanzo turns half away, facing the sunlight.
McCree counts to six in his head. He won’t let Hanzo get away. The man looks like he might run all the way to Asia, and that's far away. McCree is sure he's found another outsider like himself, because even though they're both in America, it isn't McCree's America. That is far away, too, out in the distance somewhere dusty and golden, the desert at sunset, or below ground in a Blackwatch bunker when everything's quiet.
”Yeah,” he replies. ”I know.”
Breathe.
Years later, the still pond is a mirror, showing Hanzo his own face surrounded by floating flower petals. His fingers trace the ribbed sides of his ceramic teacup; It is a sight he'd rather be without. Even when he hears the unmistakeable sound of McCree approaching, spurs jingling and boots trampling through the garden, across the gravel, he can't tear his eyes away. They've had two quiet days just the two of them. That has been enough to take the worst edge off of Hanzo's alertness - or paranoia, as McCree calls it, half-joking - so that he can take the time to just sit on the slope behind the house. It used to be Shimada property. Was Shimada property all the way up until all the guards and caretakers were quietly disposed of.
McCree's shadow is long in the late afternoon-sun.
"What'cha looking at?"
Hanzo is pleased that the other man can at least sense the mood enough to not use one of his many, many pet names. Nevertheless, he sees a crease forming between his eyebrows in the water. "Myself," he then responds.
“Ah. Vanity.” A moment later McCree is crouching down beside him, reaching out and brushing his hand against the surface of the water, along the cheek of Hanzo' reflection.
Ripples spread across the pond.
"You look fine as always."
Hanzo lifts his head to look at McCree, sun-tanned and smiling. The scent of his too-strong coffee and dangerous smoke lingers on his breath. He looks like the rest has done him good, made those bags under his eyes go away, made his movements slower and more gentle. Lazy, almost, like he is perpetually just awoken from a long night's sleep.
Hanzo, on the other hand -
"I think I look worse," he says. "And..." He brushes a tuft of hair back behind his ear.
McCree smiles like he's found a grand secret. "Oh," he mumbles, "You've got grey hairs."
"Yes. It doesn't bother me."
"That's a lie if I ever heard one. They say worrying makes it come early. What's on your mind?"
Hanzo brushes McCree's hand away as it reaches for his hair. By now the pond is still again, and he can see every little speck of silver. It is not vanity that keeps him looking at that small detail - not that it looks bad, as McCree would doubtlessly assure him a thousand times over - but it *is very simple evidence that he is getting old.
Old was supposed to mean power and respect. People bowing to him. Being head of a clan. Now, it's a body giving up, breaking in small increments, making his wandering more difficult - a reminder that time might run out - and it only took two days of rest before he realized it started long ago.
Old is something Genji won't ever get the way he should. Not a single grey hair on his head. Hanzo thinks of that, too.
"Have you ever thought about growing old?" he asks McCree.
A shrug. McCree takes off his hat and places it in the grass beside him - "I imagined it would be nice if it was like this. Peace and quiet for once. But I don't plan on doing it quite yet."
"No. Of course not."
"I still look young and fresh, don't I?"
"That you do."
But Hanzo reckons that McCree probably feels it too. All that sleeping would make anyone feel like an old man.
Maybe that's what they're going to become. Two old men sitting on a hill together.
Maybe that's not the worst thing that could happen.
McCree does not worry about his body in general getting worn. If he starts to get a little more sore in the morning after spending the night on a hard wooden floor, that's just life. Being worn can be a good thing, like a pair of boots made all the more comfortable by years of wearing them. He never expected to make it past thirty, so in a way it's all a pleasant surprise. He wants to be the kind of old man who can predict the weather when his left knee starts acting up again. But his arm is bothering him.
Prosthetics get outdated far more quickly than flesh, and there's no going out with grace for old machinery. The market is always getting flooded with newer models. He should know; he's stopped shipments of them from being stolen. And he's stolen som himself. He could probably get something better - call on old friends in the business, maybe even the Overwatch techies or the guy who forged his gun. He could, but he does not.
He sits in a dusty room surrounded by empty sake-cups - Hanzo still hasn't managed to convince him of the superiority of Japanese alcohol compared to American swill, but it's better than nothing and worth drinking just for the sake of the company. He’s alone now. With practiced motions, he pulls apart the metal to reveal the inner workings of the prosthetic. He tightens screws and places droplets of oil wherever needed, rinses sand from hinges (he's still got half the Mexican desert in there) and prays to nobody in particular that a newly acquired scratch won't be the last straw on the camel’s back.
"C'mon. Work with me.”
Half the time he's convinced that the damn hand has a mind of its own. He knows that he's had too much to drink when the ring finger refuses to bend, and if he was superstitious he'd say that the metal has been drenched in enough blood to make it haunted.
He hears Hanzo walking in the hallway, the nightingale-floors squeaking with each step. McCree has only a second to react before the paper-thin door slides open and Hanzo stands there backlit by an evening sky that’s all yellow like a cornfield. The light hits McCree's side, too. It's like the sun has it out for him *personally and goes out of its way to show off the stump where his arm ends. No point in trying to hide it. He lets Hanzo see. It's not like he hasn't seen it before, it's just that... It's different when they've talked about aging and breaking and his left hand is lying so that every ancient circuit is exposed.
"Are you busy?" Hanzo asks.
"...No, not really." McCree forces himself to resume his tinkering, but damn, it sounds so fake and forced when he whistles. A look from Hanzo makes him stop.
Yeah. It's better in silence.
Hanzo watches McCree work in that particular, intense manner of his. McCree has seen the same look used to study good archers or artisans or, in one memorable occasion, a very talented chef cooking a crepe. Hanzo take every small movement in like he's about to do it himself. Learning, attempting to understand. He only leans back and relaxes when McCree snaps the last bit of the cover shut and puts the hand back on.
He flexes his fingers.
"Good as new."
"Perhaps it needs a little polish," Hanzo suggests. "I could find-"
McCree shakes his head. "Nah, it's fine. It's a bit busted, but I wouldn't have it any other way."
Hanzo nods like he understands, but McCree has his doubts. He wonders if the other man compares him to Genji in his mind. If he can fathom that the prosthetic isn't a fix for something marred and hurt, but simply another part of him by now.
At least Hanzo takes the metal hand in his like it was flesh and blood
When the sun sets and they both have sake on their breaths, nestled against each other in the corner of the room, Hanzo finds it hard to focus. He strives to always be in that state of mind just before the arrow leaves the bowstring, but now he can’t think of anything but the man beside him and instead he is the bowsting, oh-so-tightly wound, close to breaking.
McCree’s words fall easily, casually from his lips but pierce Hanzo every which way.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, and other such things that all betray the same intent, roundabout ways of saying I love you.
Stop, Hanzo tells himself, breathe.
And McCree is counting his own heartbeats, one two - three four – five six as he feels a little like when he’s in a fight. There’s a sense of something great being at stake here, and his pulse reflects it.
Hanzo takes his hand, draws it to his chest, and holds it there.
One two – and his heart might as well stop there, because he’s doubting there’ll ever be a moment like this again for him. The wooden floor and the walls and the roof creak and settle in around them. The dragons carved on the beams are frozen in time. McCree leans against Hanzo, taking in the quiet as they both allow time to pass without moving, acting, thinking. He doesn’t know how to say that he’d like to stay like this for a long, long time. That he’d like to count the years they spend together.
Hanzo takes a long, deep breath.
Then they kiss without knowing who initiated and who followed – both or neither – brief and sweet because they know each other’s mouths, their bodies, even when they're changing. McCree doesn’t feel the urge to talk at all afterwards because Hanzo should know by now how much he’s loved, and Hanzo in return does not let go like he would let go of an arrow. He rests in the moment, in the last light of the day.
Same old, same old.