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McCree steps off the shuttle into the Watchpoint hangar, weighed down by the bone-deep exhaustion of a ten-day mission and the intense desire to collapse face-down in his bed and remain unmoving for as long as circumstances will allow. On the ride home, he had entertained the notion of a shower and food before the collapsing, but at this point, not even those could sway him from his course.
However, when he catches sight of Hanzo waiting by the entrance–waiting for him, he realizes with no small amount of joy, because Genji had already passed through– he decides bed can wait just a couple more minutes.
“Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes,” McCree sighs, leaning immediately into Hanzo before Hanzo can even lift his arms, letting Hanzo take half the weight of his body. Hanzo chuckles, the sound of it rich and warm to McCree’s ears, and envelopes him in a welcoming embrace. “Hey, sweetness.”
“Hello, Jesse,” Hanzo murmurs. “ ¿Como estas, mi querido?"
“ Cansado, pero bien, ” McCree answers absently, face pressed into the crook of Hanzo’s neck. Then he pauses. Lifts his head. Looks down at a smiling Hanzo, whose eyes glimmer with mischief.
“Where in the hell’d you learn that?” he asks.
“Internet.”
“Really.”
Now the mischief is replaced by a hint of apprehension. “Is that alright? I admit, I only know a little, and I do not fully understand the rules of the language yet . . .”
McCree had been paying so little attention in his exhaustion that he has to think on it now, take a few seconds to remember what Hanzo actually said. Once he recalls the words, however, and the way they sounded in Hanzo’s rough, low voice next to his ear, he grins.
“Reckon you ought to tell me everything you’ve learned,” he says. Hanzo smiles, too, and as he leans up to give him a proper welcome-home kiss, the words echo in McCree’s memory.
Mi querido. My dear.
–
Hanzo doesn’t tell him everything he’s learned. Instead, he makes McCree wait.
He hasn’t endeavored to learn the whole language. At least, not yet. “Just a few things,” he explains, embarrassed, when McCree hassles him about it (in English and Spanish, just in case he can get Hanzo to respond in the latter). “I … thought you might like it, if I learned a little.”
McCree does. Very much.
Hanzo drops the occasional word or phrase when McCree isn’t expecting it, as though he is deliberately attempting to surprise him with a new bit of Spanish here and there. McCree shouldn’t be so surprised every time, but he is, pleasantly so.
Hanzo’s accent isn’t flawless–something about the transition from the strong, syllabic tones of Japanese to the smoother lilt of Spanish seems to trip him up at first. There are a few words that aren’t pronounced quite right, although never so badly as to mix them up, and he’s pretty clearly not a native speaker. Still, it seems like Spanish was developed over some thousands of years just for the day when Hanzo would start speaking it, because pronunciation or no, every word that passes his lips sounds like the sweetest music to McCree’s ears.
He can’t pretend, either, that he isn’t awful flattered by the effort Hanzo’s putting in. Hanzo doesn’t devote his attention to projects he does not deem important, after all.
–--
“No, listen, listen,” McCree insists, laughing. He gestures with his drink, overexaggerating in his tipsiness. “You gotta roll the Rs! It’s not that hard!”
“It absolutely is,” Hanzo responds, half-angry and half-laughing. He points an accusing finger at McCree, sloshing the drink that’s in the same hand. “You only do not know because you grew up speaking it!”
“No, it ain’t. If a bunch of thirteen-year-old white kids in middle school could do it, so can you. Listen. You just gotta–tip of your tongue behind your top teeth and sorta blow past it.” He demonstrates, trilling an elongated R sound with the practiced ease of 38 years of learning. Hanzo frowns comically at him.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” he says before immediately attempting it himself. McCree swallows down his drunken giggles as he watches Hanzo try a good four or five times, visibly overthinking the position of his tongue in his mouth and making awkward R noises that could be considered flipped once or twice, perhaps, but not properly rolled.
Then he does it, just once, and he looks as surprised as McCree is. “Hey, there you go,” McCree says.
Hanzo makes the noise again, a perfectly rolled R. Pleased with himself, he smiles and says, “ ¿Te gustas, mi amor?", unnecessarily but flawlessly rolling the ending R.
McCree’s mouth runs dry. Hanzo must see how that affects him because he smiles, slow and seductive. “ Mi amor,” he murmurs again, but he hits the R too hard and flubs the pronunciation, McCree snorts, unable to help himself, and Hanzo frowns deeply.
“Fuck,” he says, sending McCree into fresh peals of laughter.
–
“ Buena suerte, ” he says before McCree boards the shuttle for an assignment in Russia, followed by a dry kiss to his jaw. McCree fancies Lady Luck does favor him a little more that evening when his infiltration goes off without a hitch.
“ Ten cuidado, ” he says before they separate on a shared assignment, and he smiles a little when McCree repeats the sentiment.
“ Te extraño," he murmurs, averting his gaze, when a mission keeps him away a bit too long and their video calls are their only chances to see each other for two weeks. That one makes McCree’s chest ache viciously.
--
“What do you think?” McCree asks, turning to Hanzo for approval. He hasn’t worn this suit in a good long time, and he’s not too sure about the fit anymore, but he’s not keen on getting a new one and he can’t very well walk into tonight’s swanky event in jeans and spurs.
Hanzo eyes him up and down slowly, reverently. McCree lets himself feel a little proud. Must not fit too bad after all.
“It is very good,” Hanzo says. He steps into McCree’s space, taking the ends of his tie in both hands. He leans up, brushing his lips against McCree’s jaw. “ Estoy muy guapo. ”
McCree can’t help the sudden laugh that bursts forth. Hanzo looks up at him, startled and affronted. “What?” he demands. “I am certain that was the right word.”
McCree coughs, clears his throat, swallows down the chuckles that still threaten to be known. “I know what you were goin’ for, sugar,” he says, “but you conjugated that a bit wrong. Just called yourself handsome.”
Hanzo frowns thoughtfully, and McCree can all but see him running through the words in his head, trying to pinpoint the mistake.
“Well,” Hanzo says after a moment, “that one is also true.“
McCree doesn’t even try to hold back his laughter this time, and Hanzo laughs too, shaking against McCree’s chest with the tie still gripped in both hands. “Well,” McCree says, “thank ya anyway, sweetheart. The effort’s appreciated.”
–--
That suit only last about six hours. Between the two bullet holes in the back of the coat (a small price to pay, considering the bullets almost ended up in the back of him), and now Hanzo’s hands desperately ripping the thing off of him in the heat of the you-were-almost-hurt-and-I-need-you-now frenzy that followed the near-miss, it never stood a chance. McCree doesn’t mind much.
“What do you want?” McCree asks breathlessly as Hanzo pushes him back onto the bed, already worming a hand past the band of Hanzo’s pants.
“Anything,” Hanzo says through his teeth. His hands come up to frame McCree’s face and draw him into a hard, sweet kiss, and when they break, he lingers, lips brushing McCree’s.
“ Tu, ” he murmurs. “ Solo te necesito."
Hearing Hanzo use Spanish to say he needs him is certainly more of a turn-on that McCree had expected and immediately lights a spark in his gut. But it’s the utter sincerity in Hanzo’s voice, the grip on his face that’s just this side of too tight, the worry in Hanzo’s brow that hasn’t unknit since McCree first got back from the mission that cause something in McCree’s chest to twist painfully.
“Alright,” McCree says, throat tight. “You got me. You always got me.”
–--
In a way, McCree sees this one coming. It’s three syllables and damn near everyone in the Western world has heard it in some form, so he imagines Hanzo probably picked up on it ages before he actually started trying to learn anything. It should be cheesy and terrible.
Still, though, he is not prepared–not for the way Hanzo’s lips form the words against the back of his shoulder as they lie together in bed, not for the hitch in Hanzo’s voice as he starts to speak, not for the way Hanzo’s hands tighten minutely around his middle, not for the low, nervous, wonderful rasp of Hanzo’s voice murmuring, “ Te amo. ”
It takes a long moment for McCree to trust himself to speak. He wraps a hand around Hanzo’s, brings it to his lips, presses a kiss to the backs of the knuckles. “Me too,” he murmurs. “Me too, darlin’.”