Work Text:
There is a softness to his touch that wasn’t there before. Perhaps no one notices it but her, but she finds it there, in passing. Touch was difficult when he started. A body of metal lacked true tactile sensory, and his mind struggled in how to measure pressure with the electric sensors. How much force to give and take. Hands of sinew and silicone. Bone and blood replaced by titanium alloy and oils. His hands that had been rough with callouses, (she remembered holding that hand, cold and bloody and squeezing, just so he had something to gasp onto in those moments when he’d been fighting so desperately to breathe), still smooth even after so many years being worn with weapons and work.
His body was new, fresh- even after years of it being made.
Yet as she stood on the platform, welcoming his teacher, his master, his touch on her shoulder, (so familiar, affection radiating despite how he’d left, bitter and embracing his own warped self-loathing and hate), she could feel a gentleness that he’d never possessed before. He sweeps his hand down her shoulder to her arm, fingers lacing as he tugs her forward, his eagerness to introduce her to the monk made teacher. An omnic of spiritual senses. The strangeness of the fact it would be a sentient robot to teach a cyborg self-acceptance is not lost on her.
He holds her hand and brings it to the omnic’s. His hand is pure metal, there are no handmade designs to allow sensory grip. To measure things that humans might need. Tactile feeling. Pressure. Heat and cold. Functioning and electronic numbness. Yet that’s how she understood. The touch was the same. An omnic’s hand as gentle and kind and so familiarly human to that of a man she’d trapped in a body only half his own.
“You are the one who healed Genji are you not? He has told me a great many things about you doctor. He has called you his savior.” She smiled, bending to whisper in ears that did not exist.
“I did not heal him, that seems to have been all you.” As she pulls away the omnic’s laughter ripples out and the man who stands next to them says perhaps he has made a mistake bringing them together. But they laugh shortly before heading inside. She can’t help but smile.
It is the first time he has touched her without fearing he might hurt her.
She doubt he even realizes it, but she knows him.
He will touch her again, and this time, without reservations.