Work Text:
For the first few days after meeting Genji’s brother, Cole felt himself grappling with his morals longer than he wanted to. He’d never really held himself to that high of a regard - better yet, he felt no hesitation forgiving people who were victims to their circumstances.
A broken world creates broken people, forcing them to do things they never would’ve done otherwise. He only had to look at the long list of things he’d done with Blackwatch, most of it initially guised as the greater good to accept that he couldn’t be litmus paper testing his way to judging who was good or bad.
Still, having a brother killer walking among their ranks proved to be a pinprick of doubt in the pond of cautious optimism he’d been nursing and nestling in his chest ever since he sought out the others.
Hanzo mostly kept to himself, Cole realized. He was absent during communal meals but was always the first one to arrive for the scheduled training sessions. He talked to no one, ate God knows what, and kept his own hours, as if haunting the Gibraltar base, his past casting long shadows that kept him in the dark and unable to reach out to anyone else.
A month into Hanzo’s arrival, things are much the same, apart from his silent presence beside Genji as he went about his day on some occasions. Hanzo had also apparently moved on from silence to polite greetings to people he came across, while still barely having said a word or two to Cole.
He once caught snippets of a conversation between both Angela and Baptiste, both of them expressing excitement over something Hanzo either said or did but other than that, Cole didn’t hear much, both from the man himself or other members on base he regularly spent time with.
A week after Hanzo’s first month on base, Cole ambled on to the sunlit rec room, in hopes of enjoying a beer or two with whoever was hanging out there. He walked in and stumbled across Hanzo sketching something in a notebook that definitely had seen better days. The scene startled him enough to momentarily forget the reservation he’d been harboring towards the man, making him blurt out his first interaction with Hanzo.
“Didn’t take you for an artist,” he said. He saw Hanzo’s body go still as he turned his head to regard Cole with wary eyes. He hesitated for a few seconds and swallowed, a movement Cole’s eyes tracked on their own accord.
“It was a guilty pleasure I abandoned years ago,” Hanzo replied as he shut the book and closed the pen with its lid. Cole glanced around the room seeing that it was empty. He sighed internally, resigning himself to have a stilted conversation with a man he’d been steadily avoiding for weeks.
“Yeah? You pickin’ it back up?” Cole asked when he realized he’d been quiet for a bit too long. He placed himself on the empty chair opposite to Hanzo as he amped himself to find things to say and talk about with the man. Hanzo looked over at him from under his lashes, his eyes cutting into Cole with an intensity that seemed as an extreme overkill for a random afternoon.
“With Genji’s insisting encouragement, yes.” Hanzo replied back after his eyes had roamed over Cole a few times. They sat in silence for a minute or two, as Cole tried to imagine what Hanzo had been sketching away when he got here.
“You good with beer?” Cole asked him as he remembered what he came to the rec room for.
Hanzo’s eyes widened minutely but he nodded in affirmation and Cole got up to retrieve the bottles from the refrigerator that was tucked away in a corner of the room.
He slid a bottle across the table to Hanzo who gripped it with beefy fingers. Cole fished out the mini bottle opener he pocketed earlier before sitting back on his chair and popped the lid off, swallowing down the chilled beer that made his mouth go numb.
He felt eyes on him, which made him look up and catch Hanzo’s unblinking stare. Cole felt caught and tangled in his gaze and he racked his brain to escape whatever Hanzo’s stare meant.
“Can I see?” Cole finally managed to ask, breaking whatever Hanzo was trying to communicate with his gaze. Hanzo’s eyes left Cole momentarily as he looked at his notebook. He clenched his jaw, and Cole looked on with an unnamed feeling brewing inside him as Hanzo flexed his arms, the muscles stretching the fabric of his Overwatch issued black shirt.
“It’s private,” Hanzo finally said, pulling Cole’s attention away from the man’s arms.
“And I’m nosy,” Cole quipped back right away, making Hanzo’s face go slack with surprise. Cole felt a smile tug at his lips as he added, “C’mon now, don’t hold out on me.”
Hanzo huffed out a laugh, the first of its kind that Cole got to see, and flipped open to the page he must’ve been working on. With some hesitance, he pushed the notebook towards Cole, who flashed Hanzo a smile that he hoped was reassuring.
Cole eagerly leaned in, a part of him excitedly going over possible scenarios of what he could see. Whatever image that flashed in succession in his mind as possible pieces Hanzo was about to show him was nothing close to what was etched on the paper.
The traffic omnic was drawn with perfect detail - Gibraltar had one in almost every intersection, an omnic specific job that was initially a project to help newly freed omnics better mingle with humans. The shading that Hanzo added with his pen was realistic despite the blue ink and the entire work gave off a sense of melancholy, as if it was infused with its artist’s emotions.
“Gotta be honest here,” Cole said as he continued staring at it. “This ain’t what I was expectin’ to see.” Hanzo’s only reply to him was a shrug, which made Cole scramble to add something positive. “It’s real good though. Why a traffic omnic?” He asked in hopes of encouraging a conversation. He suddenly realized that he wanted to hear Hanzo talk.
Hanzo stayed silent for a moment, ultimately deciding to break his silence. “His sense of duty was admirable,” Hanzo said, his voice quiet. “He went about his job despite the rising tensions against omnics around the world, secure in his knowledge of what was expected of him, and conducting his duty, regardless of the reality of his kind.”
Cole found himself blinking blankly at Hanzo, his mind trying to ruminate the surprisingly deep insight Hanzo provided. “Well, he's doin’ his job, right?” Cole said, still attempting to create a more coherent response.
He brought his gaze back at Hanzo’s face in hopes of maybe finding a better reply on his face. Instead, he was met with a strand of hair that had somehow fallen out from the neatly combed back hair. It hovered over Hanzo’s forehead and rested on his brow, the dark strand bringing out the color of his eyes.
Hanzo was also mindlessly biting his lips, a supposed habit that Cole never had the privilege to see before. His mind fought to figure out what that thoughtless behavior meant.
“I suppose,” Hanzo said, immediately breaking the trance that Cole had slipped into while trying to decipher Hanzo. “A lot of events in our lives appear to us as jobs. We might even convince ourselves that it is something we are meant to do.”
Cole turned over the words, a thread of the deepness behind them finally sparking in his mind. “At least he’s gettin’ paid for it,” Cole replied, the answer feeling inadequate but he still couldn’t figure out how to at least sound more profound than he was.
“Sure, we can assume that,” Hanzo said back in partial agreement.
“Somethin’ about money making the world go round,” Cole added with a snort. He glanced at Hanzo, a part of him weirdly hoping for a reaction. A corner of Hanzo’s lips was pulled up into a slight smile, the sight of it making Cole want to clench his fists.
“You must admit that there are other things we are paid with,” Hanzo said with a slight sigh. “Respect, belonging, admiration, support…” Hanzo listed off, his unfocused gaze focused on the wall on the other side of the room. “We do as we are told or what is asked of us and a small part, no matter how much you try to push it down, expects some form of compensation for it.”
Understanding bloomed in Cole’s mind as he finally found something to say back to Hanzo’s continued insightfulness. “You’re talkin’ to a former Blackwatch agent who ran around the world doin’ what I could ‘til everyone decided that I was in the wrong for it. Yeah, I’m aware of it.”
“And did you always agree? With your commanders? With what was expected of you?” Hanzo asked, his voice inquiring, asking for details that felt too personal to share but it somehow still managed to be gentle.
“No, I didn't,” Cole said, the echo of Reyes’ guns thundering in his ears. He drew out a long sigh, finally getting to the root of what Hanzo had tried to capture as he sat there and sketched out a lone omnic going about his traffic control job.
“It wasn’t up to you,” Hanzo replied, acknowledging Cole’s unsaid words. “You carried out your duty, and your worth was determined on how well you managed to do your job.”
The depth of Hanzo’s astuteness triggered a bright burst of impulsivity to deflect the unspoken meaning behind the words and Cole grasped it like a lifeline. “Shit, Shimada, you apparently go big or go home,” Cole said with a somewhat uneasy laugh.
Hanzo raised a brow at him as he moved to pull the notebook back as he closed it and put it back to its position. Cole stood up, hoping to use that as a big enough interruption to make his way out. His mind warred with itself; half of him wanting to stay and delve into whatever Hanzo wanted him to explore while the other half screamed at him to get away and figure it out on his own thoughts.
“Alright, gotta head back to Winston. He’s expectin me in a bit,” Cole lied, hoping Hanzo wouldn't pick up on it. Hanzo’s only reply was a dismissing nod, and Cole was out of the room without a second glance.
That night, Cole found himself blazing with an emotion he simply couldn’t place. Try as he might, he found himself wide awake as the glowing digital clock ticked away the seconds of the night.
When he finally found his eyes drooping with utter exhaustion, his last thought was of Hanzo and how pretty he looked in the sunlight of the room - how a string of honor, duty, and responsibility tethered them to each other, despite how different they might be.