Work Text:
The scissors that slid along the top of Genji's head weren't made for cutting hair. The blades were dull from cutting prayer flags, smooth from running through thin cloth so many times the colored fabric could be strung down the pathways of mountains and back. The Shambali had no members that could grow hair. They made do, just as they always had for Genji. If he had ever been a burden upon their community, none of the monks had ever said so--but it was a fear that tugged at his gut every now and then, that some day their generosity would run out for him, and the eggshells that Genji had tiptoed into the monastery on would finally shatter.
At first, Genji had been afraid that Zenyatta's hinged parts would become snagged in his locks as the omnic had carefully brushed a few errant pieces back to join the others, but the monk was so gentle it scarcely tugged more than getting his hair combed. The sheen had grown dull from under-eating--a mostly liquid diet would do that to anyone--but when Genji had been a boy, it had been dark, and soft.
Cool, metal fingertips sifted through his matted hair as the maw of the toothless shears began to size up their prey, yawning around one piece before thinking better of it and moving to the next. Genji shifted atop the simple, wooden stool he'd been hunched over on, and the seat groaned quietly under his weight. The surface had been worn away from years of use, unpolished wood now carrying the smooth gleam of age from countless backsides--human and omnic alike--sliding on and off of it. He briefly imagined the legs sliding apart beneath him, and the stool slowly descending to the ground like an old mule finally beat from years of toiling. It seemed they'd been dallying long enough for such a thing to happen. His hands gripped at his knees, rubbed at his thighs anxiously.
"Forgive me," Zenyatta said, his warm voice resonating against the metal of his faceplate above where Genji sat. There was a very slight, metallic ring to it. "I am finding myself hesitant to make the first cut. I'm sure this is not making it any easier for you."
"I don't care," Genji replied curtly, fingers curling into themselves. "No matter where you start, it will all be gone."
"Already, my student gives me knowledge beyond my years." Zenyatta's tone was good-natured, though it gave off the impression that he was treating the man gently on purpose. "I am not sure why I hesitate. Sentiment for appearance is exactly why monks who followed Siddartha so many years ago would shave their heads." He gave Genji's hair one last thoughtful stroke, tucking some behind his ear, before he drew the makeshift cape about his student's shoulders closer.
They were hidden within a cloister of drying laundry, with the vivid dressings of the Shambali unfurling around them in the chilly air. Sheets of dandelion yellow and embroidered fabrics of vermillion danced, popping to life against the distant blue of the mountains on the horizon. Some of them looked as though they'd had a great hand scoop away their pieces, leaving shallow bowls for snow to collect in, and others were gentle slopes into the valleys beneath the Shambali homestead. One could look out over the precipice of the mountain and easily see houses and towns below, strung together with colorful prayer flags leading back to a wide-trunked fig tree near the center of the monks' own village. Though isolated, the flags were a reminder that the Shambali were still close to the laypeople and at their service.
Genji's gaze was fixed on the plunging lines of the mountains when Zenyatta finally decided to begin and slowly cut one of the pieces near the back of Genji's head, the scissors sliding shut with some hesitation. The clump of hair brushed Genji's neck as it tumbled onto the cape around his neck.
"If you need me to stop, I will stop," Zenyatta stated, already moving on to the next section, two fingers spreading Genji's wild hair. "But I will warn you--you may look a little strange if I stop in the middle." His laugh was deep, but only seemed to be there to fill the silence between the two of them. The snipping of the scissors became more frequent after that, bolder in guessing how much hair the silver jaws could chew away. Genji's hands were clenched tighter as he felt his scalp grow exposed to the frigid air.
At last, though, the thick mat of hair that had once covered his head had been sheared away. When Zenyatta took a step back to rinse the scissors off in a pail of water nearby, Genji ran a tentative hand along the top of his head. What remained was short, and unevenly cut. There were patches that were thicker in parts, as though moss had begun to sprout there, while others were practically bald. Genji cringed internally, his fingertips carrying all the weight of his imagination as he explored, before Zenyatta returned to stop their prying. His grip was strong as he guided his student's wrist back down.
"It isn't cut straight," Genji said, accusatory, craning his neck to see over his shoulder.
"Then it is a good thing I am not done," Zenyatta replied, turning Genji's head back for him to view the mountains once more. "Do not be so quick to critique--I have never had a need to style hair in my life." The omnic rest his hand against a tense shoulder before offering the man a squeeze. A few errant, black hairs clung to the cape, which he brushed aside.
Genji scooted forward on the little stool when Zenyatta brought his foot up to rest there, the scissors now replaced with a plastic, disposable razor. It was wetted in the bucket of water, and a bar of soap was turned over on a frayed rag smeared with oil, made full of suds. Genji felt his body shoot with bolts of cold when Zenyatta brought the soapy washcloth to his bare scalp and began to gently rub circles across his head, leaving swaths of soap and sweeping away the last of the long hairs that hadn't been dusted off.
He scrunched his neck slightly as a trail of bubbles traveled past his ear and down his jaw. "I feel like a child," Genji groused more quietly, though the memory of sitting on a similar stool as a boy and getting rinsed off by his brother before their baths was strangely warming. It had been something they'd done grudgingly, at the behest of their mother.
Genji recalled lukewarm water, drawn from a faucet in a pail, sloshing over his shivering form and soaking the soft towel around his waist--his brother's fingers, scrubbing shampoo too roughly into his scalp and tugging at his hair like he was trying to scrape rust off of a blade. 'Stop squirming,' he'd been chastised over and over, their clumsy, young hands clashing and swatting at each other as the drawn bath water grew colder. 'You stink. The soap won't run if you stop moving.'
To someone as young as Genji, though, it hardly mattered what a tyrannical older brother wanted, with nothing to say but bossy commands and lacking the gentle touch of their mother. In the moment, there were suds in Genji's eyes, and his only wish was to dunk himself in the warm bathtub and sink to the bottom: into the quiet, away from Hanzo's bullying hands that were at the beck and call of their parents.
Though it was poorly given, it was now that Genji realized that those nights had been a gift from his brother, whether he intended them to be or not--a favor borne not so much out of love, but of duty. He wanted to believe love had played a small part in it too; at least for a little while, when they'd been too young to know the vastness of their roles in the Shimada Clan. There had never been enough room for both after that.
The razor's blade kissed the top of his head, and skimmed his patchy hair like a skipping stone carving out a path of ripples on water. Zenyatta was silent, his fingertips gently bracing the side of Genji's head as he focused on regulating the pressure he was applying while he shaved strips of hair away. Once in a while, there was a pause as he leaned over to unclog the razor by tapping it a few times against their water pail. It would return, clean and cool, to continue its work. The process took longer than cutting most of Genji's hair off, and the time was only punctuated with the 'tap-tap-tap' of the razor; the splash of water. The wind was bracing, and carried the distant calls of birds on it while the day's laundry fluttered around them.
Eventually though, Zenyatta paused to run his finger along the back of Genji's head. Where his intact flesh and the synthetic skin of his cyborg body met, there was agitated scarring. Genji flinched away, able to feel the touch even if the sensation was dulled.
"Does it hurt?" Zenyatta's voice curled around from behind Genji's head. "I am sorry, my student."
He shook his head, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his prosthetic. "Not used to it. ...It's okay." Spine sagging, Genji slumped over on the stool. "I feel like an egg."
That provoked a chuckle from the omnic, who finished cleaning up a few missed spots on Genji's scalp before wiping the bare skin there with the rag one last time. There was a sting to it--he'd been nicked a few times in the process in spite of the soap smoothing things out.
"You are learning," Zenyatta insisted, arms encircling Genji's neck to whisk the cape off of his shoulders, bundling it together. "to look past your own eyes. There is not one brother or sister in this sanctuary who would think any less of you for your appearance. We never have." The omnic took a few steps away from all of the drying laundry to unfurl the fabric, and Genji watched as bunches of his hair were shaken out and carried away to the valley below them--dark feathers scattered on a breeze. Zenyatta paused, as if in contemplation, and was nearly statuesque against the clean blue backdrop surrounding them. Under the dings and scrapes of typical omnic wear and tear, his metal plates gleamed. After dusting his own robes off, Zenyatta returned to Genji, bending over slightly to examine his handiwork. The faint clicks of the omnic's concealed eyes, adjusting their positions and apertures behind his emotionless faceplate, could be heard.
"...You are right, though. It is a little egg-like." His voice seemed to smile. He brought a chilled metal hand up to rub Genji's head, obviously reveling in how smooth it was. "But you are the better judge of it than I am." Zenyatta retrieved the bucket at Genji's feet and set it on his knees to serve as a mirror. "Be gentle to yourself, my student."
Genji didn't look at first, attempting to rationalize with himself that what was waiting for him in the pail's reflection wasn't anything worse than he'd seen before. There had been a time in his life where he'd viewed himself in the mirror of a hospital and hadn't seen a person under the fluorescent lights. When he finally turned the lip of the bucket towards him though, what stared back at him felt completely disconnected from the face he'd grown used to.
There was his face, of course, still mangled-looking with deep, shiny scars carving canyons through his skin; the tooth or two that was exposed by a cut running through his upper lip. His synthetic jaw seemed even bulkier without any hair framing his face, and the hair of his eyebrows sat sparse, but dark. His scalp was angry-looking, red from the cold air and the scratch of the razor, with small nicks beginning to clot already. It wasn't perfectly smooth--to Genji, it was more equatable to the way a dog was shaved when it had fleas and mats in its fur. He ran his fingers along the top of his head, hand feathery light and moving over the bumps in his skull, until he reached the seam at the back of his head where his augmented flesh met his cold, bare skin.
Zenyatta barely managed to step away when the bucket of water was cast to the ground, sloshing against the stones and carrying small pieces of cut hair in little rivulets down the hill to be lost in the grass. The stool was a pedestal now, barely supporting Genji as he curled over himself to clutch at his head. The nails of his real hand dug in angrily, finding purchase, before Zenyatta's fingers encircled his wrist to move them away.
Genji didn't look up from where he had folded over, but knew that Zenyatta was kneeling on the ground in front of him. He shook his head, eyes cast to the side, as if to will him away.
"We grow."
Zenyatta's voice, low and rumbling, stirred something in Genji's tightened chest. He allowed his face to be cupped by a metallic hand, and felt the omnic's thumb catch a tear that had begun sliding down the divots and bumps of his scarred face.
"We grow," Zenyatta repeated, a second hand mirroring the other. Their foreheads, both bare now, touched. "And a seed is not shameful because it is not yet a plant. A seed is all it needs to be."
He allowed Genji to sit in silence, his head cradled in Zenyatta's hands, until another monk arrived to gather the laundry from their lines. Zenyatta and Genji finally followed the dried trickles of water, cast aside, down the mountain path when there were no curtains of clothing to hide them from the setting sun.
In reality, it wasn't long before Genji's hair began to grow back. It was like peach fuzz at first--dark, and soft. It took longer for Genji to steel himself to look at his reflection again.
---
When the time came for a trim, Genji's hair was bristly to the touch. It had grown in, black and shiny, and he would have been lying if he claimed he hadn't spent several minutes out of his days running his fingers through it to feel the texture. It felt clean. Zenyatta had joked that if his shaved head had looked like an egg, he was a newborn chick now.
The scissors were less clumsy as they skimmed the top of Genij's head, halving the sprouts of hair like they were cutting grass. Though a familiar lump was forming in his throat, Genji managed to keep up light conversation with Zenyatta when coaxed into it, and allowed his eyes to close when gentle fingers dusted off sprigs of hair onto his shoulders. He remained tense until Zenyatta offered him the pail of water once more, tentative. There was a moment when Genji saw another man as he had before, naked and exposed, while he remained behind his own eyelids with the pail clutched in his hands.
Though Genji's face seemed to change every time he saw it, who stared back in the reflection in the water was undoubtedly him. And to his delight, it was enough.