Chapter Text
His throat is a valley of broken red glass.
The thirteenth time Genji wakes from surgery, he tries to talk. And as it has twelve times before, pain makes a sound with no shape.
“So stubborn. Don’t speak,” says a sweet voice.
Doctor Ziegler, his exhausted angel, inhabits Genji’s darkness. There, she’s blank, bereft of all traits but kindness, and she takes his hand. He identifies the motion, but it doesn’t connect.
“Didn’t work,” he says. “Can’t feel.”
“Älskling, there will come a day when you will feel more deeply than any of us,” she says. “I promise.”
To respect someone, Genji thinks, is to resent them wholly.
“Don’t promise,” he whispers, moving his hand away. Doubt persists in his new body where all other feeling has abandoned him.
“Don’t give up,” says Dr. Ziegler. And when she moves around the bed, Genji finds he can track her by sound, by the soft squeak of her sneakers, her scrubs, even the faint but steady throb of her heart. Sound builds a framework in his darkness, thin neon outlines of what the world could be.
The room seems different than before this last surgery. A new room. New variations in the patterns of sound emerge and harden: fewer feet outside the door, longer intervals between beeping machines, unfamiliar announcements over the PA. And birds. There is a window and, beyond belief, he can hear its subtle vibration. Briefly, darkly, because all things after death have so far been dark, Genji wonders just how high up this new room might be. If the window is shatterproof and sealed at the edges.
While Dr. Zielger stands quietly across the room, enveloped by the maddening beep of some monitor, Genji lifts a hand to his head, to the tuft of wires that sprout from his bandages like dead grass. It’s strange to touch something and know what it is without feeling it. Destroying things doesn’t require feeling, though. Does it? He can’t remember. Genji grips three brittle wires between his new metaloid fingers, yanks them out, and crushes them. The beeping across the room stops instantly. He sighs.
A bold voice, gruff with laughter, splashes itself across the black canvas of Genji’s awareness.
“You’ve got grit, kid. Wish I had ten of you in my unit,” the stranger says, and Genji’s head whips around to find the source.
“Scheisse!” Dr. Ziegler drops something that sounds like hard plastic and rushes around the bed. Genji senses the pressure of her examination, fingers like ghosts probing his head under the cap. “Stop it, please. You will recover, but only if you’re a patient patient.”
Frustrated, needing to scream and getting nothing but wind ripping through his shattered throat, Genji turns what’s left of his face away from her. But for a split second, an agonizing breath, he feels it when her fingers graze his hand.
But she’s already moving away, and the stranger in the room says, “The last thing he needs is a pack of pretty lies, Doc.”
“I have to find replacements for these. If you want to stay and talk to him, keep an eye on him, be my guest,” she says, sneakers thumping out the door, turning in the hallway. “But no war stories.”
“That, uh, doesn’t leave me much to talk about.”
“Just talk. I’ve seen you do it.”
The door hisses and clicks, and for the first time in weeks Genji is alone with someone who’s neither a doctor nor a nurse.
“I’m gonna sit here and keep you company. Is that okay with you?”
Genji lays motionless in his anger. A chair scrapes across the floor, creaking as the stranger sits. He’s heavy, Genji can almost see the bulk of him just from how he sounds filling the space. No war stories.
A Soldier, then.
“I wasn’t kidding before, no one ever called me a great conversationalist,” says the Soldier. His voice hits Genji like a speaker laid on his chest, all-American bass under a pile of gravel. “But it seems like you could use a friend, and that’s something I know how to do.”
The chair creaks as the Soldier leans back. “Or used to.”
He’s so bitter that it tweaks something competitive in Genji. He can remember his friends, neon-lit in his darkness, but his brother still has no outline, like he’s the void itself. The silence in the room turns awkward, punctuated by beeps and announcements outside the room. The Soldier hadn’t lied, Genji thinks, he sucks at this. Under the balaclava, Genji tries to wet his lips. “Who did you lose?”
“Ain’t lost him yet, but it’s not looking good,” says the Soldier. “A sorta brother. Not the kind you’re born to, the kind you earn.”
Laughter stirs pain in Genji’s throat, and it’s comforting.
“Born brothers worse,” he says.
“Yeah, you’d know.” More gravelly chuckling, and more creaking as the Soldier leans in. “Hey, don’t talk if it hurts. Nod or something instead.”
“Head. Throat. Chest.” Genji gestures for emphasis. “Some pain is good. All that’s left.”
“That’s all you can feel, huh?” The Soldier murmurs. “Son of a bitch.”
Footsteps tapping in soft sneakers approach from down the hallway, and the Soldier moves closer to Genji’s face. Through his bandages, he can sense heat, hear the man’s heartbeat as it climbs.
“Doc’s got loads of exciting plans for you, and if anyone can pull it off it’s Ziegler,” the Soldier says quickly. “But you’re going to be missing some things, more than a few, so if you need to talk about it, er, nod about it. . .”
He squeezes Genji’s hand and two things happen so fast that the shockwaves cancel each other out: Genji feels the full range of the Soldier’s touch, and Dr. Ziegler rushes through the door.
“Found them!” she says brightly, moving around the bed.
Again, he wants to scream, but his voice splinters in his throat.
“I’ve got to head home, we’re rolling out at oh-six-hundred,” the Soldier says to Dr. Ziegler, getting up. Then he touches Genji’s arm again, he can feel it again. Real. “Listen, I’ve got some experience getting my insides reorganized by science-types. When I get back, if I’m not too banged up, I’ll come by and tell you all about it. That okay?”
Genji nods eagerly. He strains to follow the man’s footsteps as he goes, before the hydraulic door shuts. Down the hall, turning at a corner, pausing at the elevator, muffled and dispersing behind the sliding doors. Then gone.
He doesn’t even know the Soldier’s name.
But a week later, when the soft, post-op balaclava is removed, Genji spies the shape of a card on the bedside table. He asks Dr. Ziegler to read it to him.
“Jack Morrison,” she says, without looking, checking the new permanent ports smoothly integrated across Genji’s head. “He’s a good friend. And a good man. Not an easy accomplishment, given the other words on that card.”