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He can’t be sure if it’s the first time, but it’s the first one he remembers.
A metallic tang fills his mouth. He cannot breathe. It is no metaphor, no exaggeration. His lung is crumpling around the tip of a spear.
His killer’s eyes widen with sudden recognition, mouth shaping an unfamiliar word. It might mean no. Those pretty eyes overflow. Barely more than boys, the both of them. Is he the first this one has killed? Let him have that honor, at least; let them both be permanently marked by this.
Blood bubbles out when he laughs. Finally, he has found something to live for, and he’s dying. At least it is in the arms of a man he could have loved.
Two boys are born days apart. They learn to hunt together, to lay traps together, to distinguish the helpful plants from the harmful together. When sleep evades him, he crawls into his friend’s blankets and marvels at how well they fit. Inseparable, even in slumber.
They may be needed on the hunt some days, but they are still young enough to play. They race through the grass, laughing. He’s not the quick one, but he has his own advantages. He leaps before his friend can get too far, and they tumble to the ground in a heap of limbs. Tangled together, the laughter dies, but their hearts keep pounding.
The wind carries his mother’s voice calling his name. He climbs shakily to his feet. Something strange lives inside him now. A new possibility, unnamed. He can see it reflected back at him.
His mother calls again. They smile fiercely at one another, then they race back home.
That is before the boats come, carrying strangers and deadly plague. Sweating, skin aflame, he remembers that day in the grass. He remembers some other time and place, tears in his friend’s eyes, his hands trembling around the haft of a spear. His tongue swells too big for his mouth and his body cramps, but a gentle peace falls over him. One more time, his friend helps him find rest.
They are on the same side this time. He steals a kiss before the battle, and he dies while the memory of the answering smile is still fresh.
Her father chooses the man she weds, but she is fond enough of him. He is gentle, and he makes his many nieces and nephews laugh. One day, he will do the same for his own children.
Her dowry of sheep keeps them comfortable. They are well fed and content, but her body struggles to produce children.
There is a woman in the village who can help. She expects an old crone, but she meets someone her own age with the most beautiful eyes. Something warm blossoms in the wake of her crooked smile.
She takes the herbs home with her and brews a tea, and she wonders why her husband no longer feels like enough. She wonders how she can feel hollow with a life growing inside her.
She needs other teas now, for nausea, for pain. Sometimes she simply invents an excuse to go. The wise woman always provides, always smiles, always shares a story. With every packet of herbs exchanged, her fingers ache where they have brushed.
She savors each visit in a way she doesn’t fully understand. She cannot stay away; she is most alive inside the cramped hut, surrounded by her strange herbs. They grow closer with every passing week.
When the day arrives, the midwife is there at her side, combing sweat-soaked hair from her face. The tight clasp of their hands makes her feel whole and safe, even as she cries out in pain, even as her grip grows weaker. She never meets her son.
He dies choking on poison.
She dies to a knife meant for someone else.
They die gulping down seawater.
He has a favorite, and he shouldn’t. His favorite pays handsomely, of course. They all do. He also kisses like he needs it to live.
He should charge more than usual; he charges less, as if the discount will be what brings him back. It doesn’t matter. His young lord is wealthy, and less naive than he first assumed. The difference arrives in the form of gifts, expensive clothing, food so decadent he could never buy it for himself.
One night, whispering against his lover’s skin, he dares to confess his dream of being an artist. Soon he finds himself showing off his paintings. He draws a portrait, exposing his affection with every line, determined to have something left when his lord grows tired of paying for company.
Instead of being abandoned, he is introduced to artistic circles, and then to society. He gains patrons and admirers, befriends other social climbers and artists clawing for opportunities. He no longer needs to charge for access to his body. That belongs to his lord alone.
He cannot have the same in turn. That isn’t the way of this time and place.
His lord marries and fathers children. Sometimes they do not see each other for weeks at a time. Sometimes he is tempted by other artists, other patrons. But the urge passes, and they both remain faithful in their own ways.
He is there when his lover grows sick with the fever sweeping through the city. They have not had a whole lifetime, but a decade is more than many people get.
Fingers tremble against his cheek, tracing its contours one more time. Beautiful eyes fix on something far away. He touches his lover’s flushed face in turn and finds it boiling hot. It should be miserable, but his lord is smiling. “I remember we used to race, you and I. I’ll see you soon, my darling.”
It is nonsense uttered in the final moments of a fever-blistered mind. Years later, when it is his turn, he will finally know the truth of it.
They meet again on another battlefield. She dies first again, but only just. The way they have fallen looks like an embrace.
He is a merchant like his father before him and his father before him and so on. Freshly opened borders and expanding trade routes have granted access to new goods, new technologies. Everything strains at the seams, so full of potential.
The day he sees her, his world narrows and expands at once. The beaded combs in her hair tinkle delicately as she enters his shop. She whispers to her friend from behind a sleeve, glancing at their gray-haired chaperone.
Her giggles stop when she catches him staring. She becomes composed and demure, but in the corners of her mouth lies a smile like a secret. He feels as if he’s been struck by lightning.
He waits an appropriate length of time to speak to her parents, and he courts her first, lest anyone think him a fool for asking instantly for her hand. He is a fool, though. It’s all he’s thought of since that first day.
He cajoles and bargains and puts every ounce of his business acumen to work with her parents, every ounce of limited charm he can summon with her. He knows he is dour sometimes, prone to dark moods. Somehow, he makes her smile anyway, and this one is no secret. It’s wide and bright, tugging more to one side than the other.
They are wed in the fall, with the leaves vivid as a sunset. She loves sunsets. She loves books and dancing and visiting far off places. He gives her as many of each as he can afford, certain somehow that it could end any day.
They get nearly thirty years this time. On her deathbed, delirious, she whispers that she is sorry about the spear and the poison and the knife. She says his son — he doesn’t have a son — lived a long and happy life. She says, “Oh, don’t cry, darling. Not again, not for me.”
He is a cobbler, a governor, a privateer.
She is a queen, a washerwoman, a farmer.
They are a tailor, a musician, a priest.
He breathes out a heavy, fragrant cloud. He lies on his back, staring at the ceiling, watching it fuzz up at the edges of his vision. His cheeks grow warm and his limbs lethargic. There’s a tape playing, some guy singing like he’s got a mouthful of marbles.
Hair spills over his bare stomach, soft and ticklish, when his lover climbs up his body to hover above him. Their hair falls like a curtain to hide them both from the world.
“You should let me do your makeup,” they say. “You have the prettiest eyes.”
“No, you,” he mumbles. He wants to protest, but he doesn’t want to endure another lecture about the limitations of gender. It’s the twentieth century, darling. We should be past all that. We’ve had, like, Bowie and disco and all those fruity spandex guys in the 80s. “Disco’s dead,” he says, arguing with something they probably don’t remember saying.
They laugh, roll away, take another hit. “Everything comes back around, baby. Even you and me.”
He loves the things they say, but so much of it is silly: that the city will be underwater in a hundred years, that Nirvana is too good to last, that one day they could get married, that there are cures for every disease right around the corner, even the big one with the tiny name that terrorizes their chosen family.
Maybe they stop believing that last one when the cancer ravages his body, too fast and yet too slow. Maybe he should be grateful it isn’t the other one, but he thinks it doesn’t matter. He’d rather die fast. When he closes his eyes, he imagines spears and lances, swords and bows. It wouldn’t be more meaningful. It just wouldn’t last for months, either.
It’s right what they say about the treatments being worse than the disease. Every round of chemo, every dose of meds does a number on him. He remembers things that never happened to him, mumbling dry mouthed about songs he never wrote and apples he never grew and a de facto marriage they never had out on the open sea.
“That sounds nice,” they say, placating, when he tries to tell them about being a painter.
“You were right,” he answers. It hurts to talk now, but they deserve to know. “We always come back around.”
War is so different now. She doesn’t lock eyes with the enemy across a battlefield; she only hears an alarm blaring. She reaches for her partner’s hand, and then the world erupts.
The train door opens, and he locks eyes with a stranger who steps out onto the subway platform at the same time as every other weekday.
Something sticks in his throat. His chest squeezes. He wants to wave, ask for the guy’s number, something. Fear stops him, as it has for weeks now. He always hesitates when it’s a man. He’s still not used to admitting it.
Besides, they’ve never even spoken. Absurd to be so hung up on a stranger. He may feel like a teenager, but he’s far from it. He’s got the receding hairline and the dad bod to prove it.
Besides, the guy’s straight, more likely than not, even if there’s a nagging feeling about the way he looks back.
Besides, he will be late to work if he misses this train.
Shame turns his gaze away, following on his heels as the doors close. He chose wrong, he thinks, but the train car is already moving. Too cautious, too cowardly. He promises himself the fear won’t stop him next time.
He imagines hitting it off. Imagines going out to a movie maybe, so he doesn’t have to talk too much the first time. He imagines another life for them entirely.
He daydreams again the next day on the platform. His palms are sweating. He rehearses, in his head, exactly what to say so that it doesn’t sound rehearsed at all. He feels foolish and afraid and alive.
He is still fine-tuning the script when the news arrives. The train isn’t coming today. His ears ring and his vision blurs. Somehow through the clamor in his head, he hears about the accident, screeching metal and fire, a body count. Maybe there were survivors, but somehow he knows. He sits on the platform a while, uncaring what the grimy concrete does to his cheap suit.
He knew immediately, but it still takes months to stop searching every time the train doors open.
Hanzo lives a hundred lives or more. Some are long and full, others snuffed out sooner than is fair. There are quiet, boring lives and lives that ripple through history, lonely lives and lives spent with someone he’s loved, impossibly, in every one.
He lives them all in the blink of an eye.
The human mind can only contain so many memories. His is at capacity; he is certain it will burst.
He’s feverish again — aware, again, of how many times he’s seen a fever kill.
It takes hours to break. He’s drenched in sweat. His head pounds, his whole body aches, and his left arm feels as if it’s on fire. Something moves under the tender skin, and his stomach lurches.
He can’t show the agony or the nausea. He sits upright, chin high, and he holds out his arm for his family to inspect the tattoo, still wet, still raw. He wills his arm not to tremble from the pain, closes his fist to stabilize.
“Two,” his father announces to a murmur of appreciation from the rest of the family. The genuine pride in his voice is almost as great a reward as the dragons themselves. Nobody else alive has two.
Two dragons, a recent fever, the open wound of a fresh tattoo, and a hundred lifetimes stuffed into his skull. Perhaps he’ll be forgiven for fainting again.
Genji pesters him later. “What did you see?”
Only three years separate them, but at their ages, it may as well be a decade. Hanzo towers over his brother. He puts as much authority into his voice as he can. The effect is somewhat diminished when it cracks. “None of your business.”
He regrets this later, when Genji won’t share what his dragon showed him. He doesn’t get to know whether his brother lived a hundred lives too. If he suffers, too, with the knowledge that in all of them, he found the same person, loved them in big ways and small, chose them whenever life gave him the choice.
He loses the right to any knowledge of Genji piece by piece, then in a final, devastating blow.
Hanzo wonders what his lover would think, if they saw. Would they love him still? There were lives when they were vicious together. He has been a warlord and a despot and a headsman. He has killed so they could be together.
Or is this one of those where they are doomed by their loyalties to opposing forces? His side aches at the thought.
He wonders if he will even meet them. The global population has risen throughout the centuries. The chances are astronomical. He would rather die at their hand again than never see them at all.
With every passing year, the memories fade and blur. He doesn’t know anymore what he was doing on the boat that time he drowned or which wars he fought in or which plagues they both survived. He doesn’t remember either of their many names.
He clings to what he can, afraid of what happens if he loses the memories too. When he tries to write them down, the words seem to melt away. Maybe this is his punishment: to watch, helpless, as all the love he ever experienced slips through his fingers. To know what it is he’s losing — and to know one day even the knowledge of his loss will fade.
He drinks, which does not aid his memory, but which does numb him.
Despite the alcohol, he makes an excellent assassin. No surprise, really. He was trained for it in this life, but he has killed more often than that. He’s predisposed to the violence.
He returns, year after year, to the site of this life’s greatest shame. He relives the pain, the regret, the guilt. It is enough to make him wish for death at times. He could start again, find them sooner, do it right again, eke out another few minutes or decades.
But in every memory he can still recall, they met, even if only in the scant seconds before one of them died. What happens if he misses them?
Lacking the answer, he cannot bring himself to end it. He survives, stubbornly, against every instinct that tells him he shouldn’t.
He won’t cause his own death, but he knows he deserves it. Ten years after Genji’s murder, Hanzo kneels, disarmed, with his brother’s blade at his throat. Perhaps it is fitting if it ends here at his brother’s hand; he still doesn’t know what else he may have stolen from Genji in trying to end his life.
He holds close the memories he has left, and he surrenders.
Genji either lets him live or compels him to; Hanzo isn’t sure which. But he understands the opportunity his brother has given him, whether or not Genji suspects the true depth of his gift.
In his past lives, he’s been a good person and a bad one and somewhere in between. The world has shifted in so many ways, and he’s had so little impact most times. He still cannot predict what shape the world will take in his next life. But perhaps he can do the shaping.
Even if he doesn’t deserve more than penance this time around, what they deserve is a better world, present and future. They deserve a better man than he is. Maybe better than he can ever be, but he can try.
He joins Overwatch, and it makes his brother proud of him. He makes friends. He fights for that better world. It is almost enough. Almost.
Excitement ripples through the base when a new ship arrives. They have gotten individual recruits before now, but this is a whole team of seasoned fighters. Greeting them is an event worth attending.
Cole Cassidy swaggers off the drop ship as if he owns the place, and Hanzo forgets how to speak.
His whole body feels suddenly magnetized. But he doesn’t know for certain until Cassidy’s eyes meet his.
Hanzo could weep, but he won’t. Not here in front of everyone. No one else knows what he knows. He can’t contain himself entirely. Instead of weeping, he smiles, relieved that at least they have met.
Cassidy looks stunned by it, and more than a little confused. “Nice to meet you,” he says after a moment’s hesitation.
He feels foolish and afraid and alive. He remembers the time in the grass, breath caught in his throat as a new possibility unfolded before him, and he remembers all the times they hurt each other.
In every lifetime he fell in love, but did Cassidy? He doesn’t recall. The old lives still slip away one at a time, until it becomes hard to tell the real things from his imagination.
It should be enough to know they have met. If it doesn’t work this time, he will have another chance.
He knows he has lived a hundred lives, but he only remembers a handful now. He remembers choosing, though. It isn’t fate; it isn’t forced.
There were times life kept them apart even when they lived. He remembers a midwife’s dry hands and a young lord who married someone else. He didn’t have to go to the wise woman so often. He could have broken things off with the married man. He could have spared his lover the consequences of staying by his side while disease laid waste to his body.
And yet, every time, he chose Cassidy. Selfishly, selflessly, whether it brought him pain or joy, he chose the same.
He learns to moderate his reflexive smile. Now that reality has set in, it’s easier. He may know about the hundred lives, but Cassidy doesn’t. It was kinder not to know all the other times. It kept him from this particularly cruel thought: what if Cassidy doesn’t choose him back?
Even if he did choose Hanzo a hundred times before, that doesn’t predict that he will do so again. And saying something now, well, doesn’t that constitute pressure? Doesn’t it seem as if he is forcing it? Relying on fate rather than his own will?
He holds it in. He keeps it safe. He clings tightly to what memories he can while the others slowly disappear.
“You’re a weird guy, you know that?” Cassidy says one day.
“Am I?” Hanzo asks dryly. He doesn’t watch the way the wind pushes Cassidy’s hair across his forehead. He refuses to acknowledge the crow’s feet.
“Kind of a loner, right? You don’t have to be.”
Hanzo considers laughing, then doesn’t. “I appreciate the options, but I often prefer my own company.” He clears his throat, gathers his courage. “With exceptions, of course.”
It makes Cassidy smile, lopsided and charming, and Hanzo’s heart tries to stop. “You mind if I smoke?” Cassidy asks.
“Go ahead.” Hanzo wonders. Cassidy has approached him this time, and rather than feel gratitude, he can only think of how strange it is. They sit in silence for a time, watching the water, and Hanzo feels a sort of flattening, as if they have done this a hundred times before. “Why are you here?” he asks, then instantly regrets it.
Rather than take offense, Cassidy only snorts. “I wanted a smoke. Was gonna ask you the same, funny enough.”
“I like to watch the boats.”
“Guess it’s kind of relaxing.”
Hanzo nods. He can’t tell him the real reason: that he’s been a fisherman more than once. That when they were pirates, they wed at sea. That he’s drowned before, but somehow the water still fascinates him, the same way he yearns for a lover who has killed him a dozen times.
“Not what I meant, though,” Cassidy says after another beat. “I meant why’d you join up?”
Hanzo glances at him again. Cassidy doesn’t appear threatening. His body is calm and relaxed. He’s got one leg tucked under the other, one foot swinging freely over the ledge. There’s something boyish about him that defies the crinkled corners of his eyes and the smell of cigars.
“My brother offered me an opportunity. I took it.”
“You mean he offered you redemption.” It isn’t a question.
So he does know. Some people on the base clearly do. Some of them have difficulty hiding how they feel about it. Cassidy hasn’t given him any clues one way or the other until now. “Yes,” Hanzo says. “Does this bother you?”
“No. Not as long as you mean it.”
Something loosens in his chest. Something he wasn’t aware was clenched in the first place. He nods, unsure he can trust his voice.
Cassidy goes on: “Somebody gave me a second chance a long time ago. Even after that, I fucked up a lot. Still fuck up a little,” he says with mischief in his eyes. Oh, he would be charming even without the benefit of Hanzo’s memories. Hanzo wants to resent it, and he can’t. “But I get it. Everyone deserves redemption if they’re willin’ to take it.” His eyes, when they pass over Hanzo’s face, are clear and clever and as lovely as they’ve always been. “You believe in second chances, Shimada?”
Hanzo laughs like an idiot, and he can’t tell anyone why. Maybe it doesn’t matter though; Cassidy’s smile is bemused, but it’s a smile nonetheless.
That is the first real conversation, but it isn’t the last. Cassidy seeks him out again and again, drawn into his orbit. He doesn’t know if there’s some compulsion, some destiny, or if Cassidy simply chooses, over and over.
But he feels right, even in this life. However impossible it is to separate the old lives from this one, Hanzo tries, and he still finds they fit. Cassidy knows what it means to have a past he isn’t proud of, to have done things he cannot erase, to have to pick up and rebuild his entire sense of self. He is honorable, and he’s brave, and he is stubborn enough to push back when Hanzo becomes overbearing.
These are all pieces of this life, the present one. And still, he comes closer, even when Hanzo feels doubtful and skittish, overwhelmed with the fear that Cassidy is compelled by something more than his own agency.
There are nights, though, when it all becomes too much. One life alone has given him enough regrets, enough nightmares. The others he remembers were not always pleasant either. Sometimes they blur together, in dreams and in the waking world. And he would rather remember the past than not, but it’s still slipping away.
His side aches and aches on nights like these.
Cassidy finds him at 3 a.m., weeping on the cliffside. Humiliating, but he is too numb from drink to feel it too keenly.
“Rough night?” Cassidy asks. Hanzo snorts, which makes that crooked smile come out. “Yeah, stupid question, I guess.” He looks away when Hanzo scrubs at his face. There’s no hiding that he’s been crying, but they both commit to pretending it never happened.
He fears saying anything that might imply this is fate, that they must be together. They have always chosen. He wants to be chosen again. But he thinks Cassidy might understand some of the rest, if he puts it just right.
He breathes in shakily. “When we bond with the dragons, they bring a sort of gift. Mine showed me my past. Past selves.” He glances sideways, braced for laughter, but Cassidy is only waiting. So Hanzo parcels out more, carefully, holding back the part about always meeting the same person. He explains the fading memories. Describes what it’s like to be unable to remember what it is you can’t remember. And he tells Cassidy what it means now, the cause of his nightmares tonight: “I had the wisdom of a hundred lives, and still…”
Cassidy chews his lip for a time. Then he says, “When I lost my arm, I almost died. Like… real ‘step into the light’ shit, you know?” Hanzo has to hide how much the thought frightens him; he still doesn’t know what happens if they never meet. “People talk about life flashin’ before their eyes, but mine didn’t. Or I don’t know. This one didn’t. Someone else’s did. Some other me, maybe. And it didn’t matter. I still went on and fucked up in a lot of ways. I don’t think it was there to teach me a lesson, really. It’s just something that happened once, and now this life is the one that’s happening.” Cassidy grins self-consciously at him. “I’m usually better with words. Don’t think I’m explainin’ it well. But you looked like you thought I was gonna call you crazy. And I don’t think you’re crazy is all.”
Hanzo clears his tight throat, wonders if the life Cassidy saw is one of those he still remembers. “I appreciate that.”
“Never told anybody about it until now, either.”
“Then we are even.”
“Yeah. We’re even. Secret’s safe with me.”
Hanzo wants to kiss him. He wants to touch his weather-beaten face and run his hands through a beard that desperately needs a trim. He knows, in this moment, that he would have wanted this with or without the interference of a past life.
He knows, too, the cost of hesitation; he imagines the shriek of metal and months spent looking for a face he’ll never see again. He hesitates anyway, words stuck in his throat.
“Now I’m worried you’re gonna call me crazy,” Cassidy says, unaware that every word sparks a thousand second-guesses.
“And why is that?”
Cassidy’s hand scrapes through his hair. His whole body is suddenly tense and twitchy. “There’s somethin’ here, right? You and me? I’m not just imagining the whole thing?”
Audacious, to bring it up now, when his nerves are so raw. Hanzo could laugh or cry. He wants to say it now, but he’s afraid to overwhelm him. I love you. I have loved you in a hundred lifetimes and I will love you in a hundred more. Cassidy was right; he’s afraid he will sound insane. “You are not just imagining it, no,” he says as casually as he can.
Cassidy kisses like he needs it to live. He kisses like he knows it has been two lifetimes since they last kissed, like he knows how many of them ended in tragedy, like he’s determined this one won’t. He tastes like cigars and bourbon and a sunset wedding under a red maple.
It will be years before Hanzo trusts enough to admit the other half of his past lives: that it was Cassidy every time. That they chose each other, again and again and again, every time they were given the choice. By then, most of the memories will have faded. He still won’t be able to write them down, but speaking them aloud means someone else can keep them for him, for when he forgets the last and only has this life left.
Despite their chosen paths, despite the odds, they’ll both grow old in this one, with the full knowledge of what a gift that alone is. When Hanzo dies, it will be after decades together, after the world no longer needs Overwatch, after they have handed down its legacy to the next generation and the next.
When Hanzo dies, it will be in his bed, with his arms around the love of every lifetime.
Art by Shower