Work Text:
He can’t remember the last time he saw snow. Things had blurred for him after his ‘death’, and things after it were understandably distant; this is the first winter he’s seen with any sort of clarity.
(Some part of him remembers; quiet footfalls, the iciness of rooftops. Steam rises from the vents on his body; cold water trickles from the gutters, thawed by the heat he produces.
This one doesn’t know what kills him. Red on white.
It’s striking.)
Winter has well and truly swept in; he generates enough heat to keep his mechanisms from freezing, so it’s not as if the conditions chill what little of his flesh is left.
He notices more around him, these days.
“I am surprised. I though there would be no birds around.”
He watches movement in the trees as they hop to and fro; he’s never really looked at birds before. Before, they were just animals. Things that existed. He was never the kind of person to reflect on nature (that was--someone else); he had other things to occupy his time.
But now he has nothing else to do, and he discovers them all over again. Zenyatta hums, pleased, at his observation.
“Nature follows its own path. Every animal, small and large, has their own way of living their lives.”
“Do you always have to phrase everything like that?” Even after a few months have passed, Genji still can’t take Zenyatta completely seriously. “You always sound like you are quoting something.”
“My. Do you really think so?”
“Yes...?” Genji isn’t sure where this is going.
“Then I will continue. People seem much happier to accept what I say if it sounds ‘authentic’.”
A pause, with nothing but the soft sound of footfalls through snow to break it. Genji thinks they’re probably the only people who have passed this way in a while.
“Does that...matter?” His voice is quizzical.
“It does when you have a very small amount of time to convince them you are something worth listening to,” Zenyatta replies, and Genji doesn’t ask any further than that.
They move on. The birds continue to flutter back and forth in their search for food.
Among the greys and browns of winter coats, Genji turns his head to follow a flash of bright red, a vivid splash of colour on the snowy landscape; it flies by, wings beating furiously. Heading somewhere else, a bird with purpose.
It only appears for a moment, a breath of time. Then it’s gone, wherever birds go in winter.
Still.
Red on white.
It’s striking.
---------
They shelter in the ruins of an abandoned house as the wind begins to howl. As resistant to cold as they both are, neither of them particularly wants to stay out in a blizzard.
Genji can’t really remember what he did back then, when the weather became wilder.
(He hunches in some alley, some forgotten alcove, and waits for conditions to become better. Thinking of nothing but his mission; everything is indistinct. He takes none of it in.)
At some point, while they wait for the storm to stop, Genji ends up leaning against Zenyatta. It’s a comfortable position, and the omnic certainly doesn’t mind.
“You are warm,” the cyborg says, with a wondering tone. Zenyatta hums again, this time in a more amused way, and Genji feels the vibration. It’s nice.
“Did you think I would not be? I also generate heat.”
“I...do not know what I expected,” Genji admits, after a moment. He never paid much attention to omnics, before; he certainly had no reason to, given the history between humans and omnics. “But it is nice.”
“Well, now you are informed.” Zenyatta turns his head with a satisfied hum, pulling his legs into something other than his usual cross-legged position with a hand, and leans against Genji’s shoulder. “Are you satisfied?”
“Yes.” Genji adjusts himself a little, getting just a little more comfortable.
Warmth pulses where they touch; he can feel the gentle vibrations of Zenyatta’s running systems intertwined with the humming of his own. A shared heartbeat.
They stay like that until the weather finally calms, and move on.
(The warmth - those brief moments of contact - linger in his memory, in idle moments. He remembers strangely specific things; the reflection of blue light on his shoulder, Zenyatta’s arm against his. The slight glow from them both, illuminating cracks and chips and indents in their borrowed shelter.)
-----------
Days pass as they continue traveling; the weather becomes kinder. The snow continues to fall; Genji is at first indifferent, then fascinated by it.
(Snow falls, rain falls; it doesn’t matter to him. All that matters is anything that impedes his purpose.
He runs, jumps, huddles somewhere if it gets too fierce. The person who looked out of that helmet then - in this memory, these brief and fleeting glimpses - are so far away now.)
It’s light, fluffy, as it tumbles down; the way sunlight glares off the layers of it coating the ground (what little sunlight peeks through the clouds) makes him reluctant to look at it directly at first
(for a moment he can almost hear the beeping of machines, that same distorted voice; is back in that space of unrelentingly bright lights where he’s trapped in a body far too heavy and noisy for him)
and so, he doesn’t. It’s still a reoccurring nightmare, one Zenyatta has to shake him from; the lingering memory of it is, even now, still too much.
Still. Snow is nice, he thinks. It’s not so bad.
They stop for a while, at some day or another (all the days blend into a long, long stretch of time, like they did -- before -- but it’s not unpleasant, now), on top of a hill; a stray impulse seizes Genji, and he pushes together handfuls of snow with a purpose.
It’s just a lump, really, and getting bigger.
“What are you going to do with this?” Zenyatta sounds curious, and a touch amused.
“I want to roll it down the hill,” he explains. The omnic makes another low humming sound (Genji has come to recognise it as something like a laugh) and scoops up a few handfuls of snow himself, pushing it onto the pile.
“It will simply fall, you know,” Zenyatta says, contemplatively, after they’ve gathered enough snow to satisfy Genji’s requirements. “It will not go very far.”
“Help me shape it, then,” Genji retorts, and the omnic laughs, hands already beginning to pat and smooth the snow into something more suited for rolling.
It doesn’t quite roll as well as Genji would have liked, once he finally pushes it down the hill, but it makes it far enough that a feeling he hasn’t managed in quite some time surges to the surface; he voices it in a way he hasn’t since he died, excited and joyful.
Zenyatta reaches out, hand on his shoulder, and he can feel the humming in the omnic that means he’s laughing once more.
(He remembers that day; grey, cloudy, the snow drifting and collecting in flecks on his armor, on Zenyatta’s body. That day, they rolled a misshapen lump of snow down the hill, and it’s a miracle it got as far as it did.
Those are the facts of the matter.
But
it’s precious to him in other ways, not quantifiable by fact;
it’s the day he first remembered how to laugh, felt like there was a reason to laugh at all.)