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“Well, it ain’t much, but it’s somethin’,” Jesse said with a sigh as he stepped back a few steps and folded his arms across his chest. He drew his lower lip through his teeth in thought, eying his handing work. “Light ‘er up, Hermes.”
The gentle hum of the generator suddenly became louder, echoing in the small and sparsely furnished excuse of a living room. The effect wasn’t immediate, and, for a moment, Jesse considered he may have made a mistake in the wiring. Before he could step forward to check, reds and greens flickered to life and tinted the room in a gentle glow. One of the small LED bulbs sputtered out a moment later, giving way to age and an eternity in storage, but the rest held their glow, illuminating the barren branches of the small sapling they were wrapped around. A mixture of carefully draped leaves in reds and golds and yellows, their softened age allowing them to be used in play of tinsel, hanging over the wires of the lights. Pinecones, stones and the occasional feather wrapped in twine hung from the thin branches as decorations, and Jesse’s scarf served as a tree skirt, hiding the pair of stools he had sandwiched the base of the tree between to keep it standing.
“All things considered, I believe you have done a wonderful job, Agent McCree,” Hermes commented, the AI turning a camera mounted in the room’s corner to attempt to get a better look at the young agent’s creation. “If you promise not to tell Commander Reyes, I would even say I prefer yours over those I have seen him present.”
Jesse snorted. “Oh, y’don’t gotta worry ‘bout me sayin’ nothin’,” he waved the AI’s words off and dropped to sit down on the thinning seat of the sofa. “I’m jus’ glad he ain’ here to see it.”
“Come now, Agent McCree—”
“But you’re right,” Jesse interrupted, pulling his hat down over his face and letting his head tilt back over the back of the sofa. “All things considered, it ain’ half bad. Better a beggar’s tree than no tree on Christmas Day.”
A click signalled Hermes shifting the camera back to its original position and the screen opposite the sofa Jesse was sitting on flickered to life, a feathered ‘H’ sitting in the centre. “And I am sure Agent Shimada will appreciate the sentiment, as well.”
“He ain’ much of a Christmas person, Hermes, y’know tha’.”
“You know what I mean, Agent McCree.”
Jesse simply sighed, and closed his eyes.
— — —
The sound of sizzling and metal gently meeting metal roused Jesse from his sleep. The small living room was dark, aside from the gentle glow of his makeshift Christmas lights and a sliver of early morning sunlight peeking through a gap in the boarded up windows. He stared blearily at the inside of his hat for a few moments as he oriented himself; reminded himself where he was and why and who he was with.
He lingered on that last thought for a moment. The only other person with him in the safehouse, aside from Blackwatch’s offsite AI, was Genji. The only sounds in the entire building, as small as it was, were coming from the small kitchen, and were unmistakably the sound of food being prepared, accompanied by the distinct smell of… bacon?
Confused, Jesse slowly pulled himself to his feet and, with only a brief glance towards his makeshift tree, he shuffled into the kitchen with a yawn and a hand placing his hat back in place on his head. He paused in the doorway, squinting against the light, and blinked a few times as it sunk in that his imagination wasn’t playing tricks on him.
There was Genji - the Genji Shimada, aggressive anti-social cyborg who had done nothing but glare daggers into their commander during their briefing for this trip and spent the entire flight to the dropzone and then the subsequent walk through the forest to the safehouse brooding as aggressively as anyone could - gently cracking an egg on the edge of the counter and dropping the contents into the pan alongside a handful of rashers of bacon.
Engrossed as he was in his task, the cyborg didn’t register the other agent’s presence until Jesse’s steps lead him to a creaking floorboard. The skillet clattered against the metal of the stove hob and across onto the counter, where a waiting (empty) glass found its fate in a million tiny pieces on the floor by Genji’s feet, and Jesse found his neck beneath the cold blade of a wakizashi drawn on instead.
Jesse grinned sheepishly.
“Sorry, darlin’,” he apologised, taking a step back. “Didn’t mean t’ spook ya. Just wanted t’ see what you were up to.”
Genji spent a long moment mentally berating himself for allowing his guard to sink so low before he finally lowered the blade and returned it to its sheath on the back of his hips. “I am cooking,” he spoke matter-of-factly, turning his head to look first at the displaced skillet, and then to the shattered glass on the floor. “I was cooking.”
“Why?” Jesse asked, picking his path carefully through the sea of shards in search of the brush and pan to clean the mess up. “I thought you ain’ able to eat stuff like tha’.”
“I am not,” Genji said, returning the pan to the top of the stove to attempt to salvage it. The bacon hadn’t burned, thanks to being removed from the heat, but all of the rashers had ended up mixing up the egg, leaving it half-scrambled and coating the bacon. “It is for you.” A pause, reevaluating the state of the attempt at a simple breakfast. “It was for you.”
Jesse sucked in a sharp breath as his finger glided over the edge of a shard of glass he was trying to pick up, distracted by Genji, and distracted still even as blood was drawn and began to drip. “Wait, wait, wait,” he said, abandoning the brush and pan on the floor and standing up, subconsciously wiping his bleeding finger on the leg of his pants. “You were cooking for me? Why? How? We ain’ meant to have anythin’ but rations.”
“It is not hard to smuggle anything anywhere, especially if it is in a small amount,” Genji calmly explained. He carefully freed the rashers from their eggy wrappings as best he could and set them on a plate. “You miss Captain Amari’s cooking that she and Fareeha put together for Christmas Day. I asked her for advice and this is what she suggested.” A pause. “I did not bring enough ingredients, however, so I cannot remake it. Rations will have to do.”
“Now, now, hang on a second, darlin’,” Jesse said, stepping closer. He made sure not to touch Genji as he moved around him to get a better look, out of fear of startling the cyborg again, and leaned a hand on the counter to balance himself as he looked at Genji’s ruined attempt. “It don’t gotta be pretty. If you’re cookin’, I’ll eat anything.”
Disbelieving, Genji fixed the other agent with a long stare, but Jesse refused to budge and refused to let the smile leave the corners of his lips. Eventually, the cyborg caved and set the skillet back onto the stove to finish cooking the mess the egg had become. “If you get sick from eating this, you are only to blame yourself,” he warned, unconvinced. “And you will still have to do your own patrols, I will not cover any of them for you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jesse waved him off, fingers stealing one of the still-warm rashers of bacon from the plate and eating it whole before he returned to cleaning up the broken glass.
— — —
“Radar analysation complete. No change.”
Jesse groaned and dropped down onto the sofa as Hermes’ mechanical voice echoed off of the walls of the small living space. “Four days and still nothing,” he huffed, laying down and cross his ankles atop one of the arm rests. “What’s Gabe even hoping for?”
“Commander Reyes hopes for the trend to continue,” Hermes explained, Genji’s report from his latest patrol still flickering on the screen. “For there to be no changes and no major movements or disturbances in these areas in order to make sure that Talon is not planning anything.”
“Ain’t it seem a little below us?” Jesse protested.
“Commander Reyes believes in shared responsibility in his team,” Hermes continued, as though this wasn’t the eighth time the AI had had to explain this. “That is why he himself has also been stationed here previously to complete the same task.”
“Hermes, it is your turn to keep watch,” Genji announced himself calmly, metal feet carefully avoiding each of the squeaky floorplanks as he entered the room.
The screen flickered for a moment before turning black, leaving the only light in the room coming from Jesse’s Christmas lights and the dim floor lamp at one end of the sofa. The cyborg stood beside the sofa for a long moment in silence, waiting for Jesse to finally move and sit up again, making space.
“Do you need a hand dryin’ your joints again?” Jesse asked, watching the cyborg sit down and produce something from the pocket of the hoodie he had pulled on. The box, neatly wrapped with a thin ribbon tied around it, was pressed into his hand, and he almost wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it. “What—?”
“Merry Christmas,” Genji said, flatly, before drawing his knees up into the hoodie and adjusting the hood around his head. His hands ended up in the pocket, still fighting off the lingering chill from his earlier patrol.
Dumbfounded, Jesse’s eyes flickered from the present in his hand to the cyborg and back again. He opened his mouth and then closed it again, floundering for a moment or two before eventually giving up on words and simply opening the present. A dark-stained wooden box greeted him, a small brass hatch flicking open to present a pair of cigars, and a wooden cigar cutter with his initials burned into the body of it. They were certainly not the highest of quality, not that he would expect anything of the sort given their meagre income, but the grin that pulled across Jesse’s face might have some thinking he had received the most expensive cigars in the world.
And then realisation struck, tearing his expression down.
“I didn’t get you anything,” Jesse said quietly, almost ashamed to admit it.
Genji snorted. “I do not want anything,” he turned his head away. “I do not like Christmas.”
“Then why all this, if you don’t like it?”
Red eyes shifted to glance at Jesse out of the corner of his eye, and one of Genji’s hands slipped out from the pocket again, resting on the space between them. “Because you do.”
Jesse watched him in a long moment of silence before a chuckle bubbled in his throat and he lowered his hand between them as well, lacing their fingers together.