Chapter Text
It’s been years. He should be able to move on. Genji took a deep breath and stood up. He turned from his seat in the corner of the cafe towards the bar, where a group of attractive young people were mingling and chatting. He walked towards them, and hesitated. After the briefest of moments, he changed course, moving past them instead. He sighed as he stepped out into the bustling city street, squinting into the sun.
All this time, and he still couldn’t let Jesse go. It wasn’t like he was desperately clinging to his memory. He had tried being with other people. But every time, he couldn’t keep Jesse out of his head. If he approached one of those people in the cafe, it would just be the same thing again. It had been happening all weekend.
He sighed. This excursion to the city hadn’t refreshed him as he had hoped. There was nothing to do but head back up through the mountains to the Shambali monastery. Genji had found the monastery three years before, and learned much about himself there under the guidance of his teacher, Zenyatta.
The two of them spoke often. Some of their conversations were painful, cutting deep to dredge out the worst of his feelings and fears. Bringing them to the surface to unwind them like so many tangled strings. But some knots were too tight to tease apart, too painful to think about. These he pushed back down, refusing to talk about them. Later, he told himself. In the future when the pain wasn’t quite so sharp. Zenyatta was kind and did not push him, but Genji still felt ashamed whenever one of their conversations struck a chord he couldn’t bear to follow. One such conversation had led to the trip he was on now.
“Genji,” Zenyatta had said, “do you think there might be something you are not considering?”
Genji was holding his head in his hands, leaning his elbows on his knees as they had sat cross-legged in a courtyard of the monastery. He had looked up at Zenyatta through his fingers. “What do you mean, master?”
“You have been struggling to ‘move on,’ have you not?”
Genji sighed. “Yes. Jesse McCree is the last piece of my past I have not yet made peace with.”
“Which is it that you want?” Zenyatta had prompted.
“What?” Genji picked his head up to give his master a puzzled look.
“Do you want to move on, or do you want to make peace?”
“I… I did not mean those as two different things.”
Zenyatta had nodded. “And yet... they are. I think that, perhaps, you have misunderstood your own wishes.”
Genji looked down at his feet, eyebrows knitting together. Could Zenyatta be right? He so often was. “You are saying that you think… I do not really want to move on?”
“It is a possibility,” the omnic had replied. “You must consider on your own whether you do. And if you discover that you do not, search yourself for the answer to the question of what you do want.” Then he had left Genji to his thoughts.
As part of that consideration, Genji had planned a trip into the city. He wanted apply his fresh perspective to the prospect of a new lover. But each time someone had caught his eye, it was the same. Every other person’s hands and lips existed only in comparison to Jesse’s. It was like a picture of the cowboy was plastered behind his eyelids, giving him that smile that made his heart flutter and his cheeks grow warm. Just the memory took his breath away. He sighed again. He still didn’t know what he wanted. There were a few things he knew he didn’t want. But this trip was, overall, a failure.
Genji trudged back up the mountain, disappointed. He hoped a talk with Zenyatta could help him pick an answer out of the tangled mess of his thoughts.
-
“It cannot be an accident that I think of him every time I consider another. I must be holding myself back from moving on. Actively.” Genji said. “I think, then, that it is not what I truly want. At some level, at the very least.” He and Zenyatta were sitting at the edge of the monastery, in a courtyard with a view of the mountains.
“Do you know what it is that you do want?” Zenyatta asked, his voice tender.
“I want to know if I will see him again,” said Genji. The words left his mouth before they had fully formed in his brain. He hadn’t thought of it in his meditation, only now. He let out a deep breath. Zenyatta’s presence was such a blessing. His understanding of himself would be not nearly as great if he had not met the omnic monk. His questions and promptings had brought Genji to countless realizations, this one just as much a revelation as all the ones before.
“Is that all?” Zenyatta prompted him gently.
“I just want to know. I do not want to forget about him. I do not… necessarily… want to be with him again. But I am tired of wondering. Right now, I do not know if he is even alive.”
“So what you want is not to see him, but to know if you will see him?” Zenyatta sounded perplexed.
“It sounds… odd, when you say it like that. But it seems I cannot bring myself to hope to see him until I know it is possible.” Genji smiled weakly.
“Love is mysterious,” murmured Zenyatta. “What will you do?”
Genji paused for a moment, thoughtful. No amount of talking would give him the information he needed to answer his question. Was Jesse alive? Where was he? Would he want to see Genji again? He took a deep breath, and replied, “There are things I need to know. Questions I cannot learn the answers to just from thinking about them.”
Zenyatta’s voice was soft. “Many questions can be answered by looking within oneself. But not all questions.”
Genji nodded.
They sat in silence for a while, a gentle wind blowing snowflakes down on them from the top of the mountain, though the sky was clear.
“If I do see him… it will not be like it was before.”
Zenyatta tilted his head to the side, but said nothing.
“What it will be like… I cannot bear to think about yet.” He sighed, turning his face up into the breeze. “I do not want to have to mourn it if it never happens.” He blinked snowflakes out of his eyes, and tears he hadn’t realized were collecting there fell out too.
“So, you must know whether you will see him again,” Zenyatta said, “before you can wonder what seeing him again would be like?”
Genji nodded. “I think that my heart might break if I do otherwise.”