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It wasn’t very often that Jesse McCree could say that he felt discontent in what should be a perfectly good afterglow. Hell, until recently, he hadn’t known it was possible.
It was hardly the first thing in his life that Hanzo Shimada had turned on its ear.
He looked at the other Alpha sharing his space and realized this was one of those nights when the bare centimeters they could squeeze between them on the narrow military-issue bed felt like miles.
Jesse considered his bedmate, the dragon peering out at the world from behind a man’s eyes. He gazed over the muscled expanse of scarred tawny skin dewed with sweat from their recent exertion and felt a low flare of possessiveness in the pit of his belly. He felt like he could bury himself in the archer’s flesh forever and still crave more, as if quenching his thirst for Hanzo Shimada was a Sisyphean task. His fingers itched to lose themselves once more in the sable fall of the older man’s hair, to pull him close and kiss the concern from the unhappy tuck in the corner of his mouth.
If only he didn’t feel so damn far away.
Voice rumbling low in the depths of his chest, sex rough and tobacco husky, Jesse broke the tense silence between them with gentle humor, “Darlin’, you keep makin’ that face after what we just did and a fella’s like to think he’s done somethin’ wrong.”
His lover didn’t speak and, to be honest, Jesse hadn’t really been expecting him to. Shimada could be unreachable when he got it in his head to be. Instead of answering, the older man settled for a considering sound that was neither here nor there, sonorous. His eyes were half-lidded, regarding the middle distance. His lashes were fans of ebony against the rise of his cheeks. Jesse had never seen anyone who could be so physically close to someone else and still manage to look so lonely. A few fingers of moonlight that had managed to slip into the room curled over the smooth slope of a powerful shoulder.
The younger Alpha could smell a bitter base-note of stress in the air and it sat unpleasantly on the back of his tongue.
He reached for a half crushed box of cigarillos sitting under his hat on their non-descript nightstand, pinching it carefully between the tips of his cybernetic fingers and bringing it to his lips. His flesh hand fumbled for a lighter before flame bloomed in the sleepy darkness - there and gone - followed by a rich plume of hot smoke. The American breathed in deep and let the aromatic burn chase the chill of apprehension from his lungs, settle his guts.
With a slow, measured motion he held the cigarillo out to Hanzo, breaching the gap between them while taking care not to startle him. He couldn’t deny the instinctive thrill he felt when, after a pregnant pause, callus roughened fingers brushed his own to take the offering.
He watched his dragon bring it up to his lips and take a deep drag, his powerful chest shifting with the action. He held the smoke in his lungs longer than was necessary, clearly savouring the flavour. The plume he exhaled was quicksilver pale, drifting up towards the ceiling like a living thing. It curled there, a few stray wisps lingering lazily near Hanzo’s brow before thinning to nothing. Hanzo sank down on the exhale, eyes drifting up towards the ceiling to follow the path of the smoke as if it had answers to all of life’s questions.
The melancholy sight further mellowed any remaining ardour in Jesse’s bones and he rolled, propping himself up on one elbow to just watch his mercurial dragon.
He knew the trick at this point was simply to be patient.
The twilight world had narrowed down to the two of them, safe and secluded in the dark confines of their shared quarters. The edges of their normally harsh reality were softened by moonlight and the spicy-sweet smudges of smoke that curled upwards from the glowing cherry of the cigarillo. There was a tender vulnerability to the two of them in this place, devoid of unyielding armor and razor-edged arrows, nothing between them but flesh and the soft brush of blankets. Normally, this private time in their narrow little place was enough to soothe the wily, restless spirit in Jesse.
Tonight, the comfortable bareness only made him feel like an exposed nerve, raw and aching. His partner was in their bed looking for all the world like he was on another planet entirely. It rankled at his Alpha nature...made him antsy. The more feral part of him bristled that the dragon dared to distance himself after a claiming, wanting to tug and bite and raise his voice. Yet the more defining part of Jesse McCree, the humble, hound-dog loyal heart of him, wanted to soothe. He wanted to lean in close and be his shield against the invisible monsters that were sadly never too far from the eldest Shimada.
The pragmatist in him, the man ruled by neither instinct, watched in silence.
He was almost surprised when he felt one of those callused hands drift over his thigh, squeezing down warmly into the meat of it.
“You have done nothing wrong, Jesse. I enjoyed myself greatly,” Hanzo finally spoke, his voice all smoke and thunder and velvet.
Sensing a welcome, Jesse leaned in, some of his chestnut hair surussing over his freckled shoulder, “Then why do you look like someone’s gone and shot your dog, darlin’? Does things to a guy’s confidence when you can make a face like that after he’s made you sing for him.”
Hanzo took another slow drag on the cigarillo before handing it to Jesse. He let the smoke curl out of his nose idly instead of blowing it all out at once, considering and quiet.
“I think perhaps that is why there is sorrow in my heart...that you have done nothing wrong,” the archer spoke only after he had taken the time to gather his thoughts, using words with the same measured precision as his arrows.
That knocked Jesse back a pace and left him confused, holding the cigarillo out until the ash fell on the bed. He cursed at the mess and rushed to brush it away, placing the smoking cigarillo in the ashtray he had been reaching for before his lover had spoken. Of all the answers he’d expected to hear, that definitely wasn’t one of them.
“You mind explainin’ that sentiment to me, sugar?”
A little line of frustration creased his dragon’s brow as if he had hoped McCree would just understand so he wouldn’t have to explain. Jesse couldn’t help himself this time and he leaned forward a little to smooth the rough edge of a thumb over the worry lines. He didn’t lean in to kiss at the corner of his lover’s eye like he wanted to, so at least he could still exercise a little restraint. He knew better than to push too hard with the proud, emotionally confused creature he had somehow charmed between his sheets.
Hanzo opened his mouth slightly, thought better of it, then pushed a bit of hair behind his ear while he considered. He allowed the touch with a modicum of distracted grace, absently reaching up to tug fondly at Jesse’s beard.
“What I had intended to intimate was that, perhaps, I grow too fond of you, yasei-ji .”
McCree rubbed his chin against the strong hand his lover had offered him, pressing a kiss to the rough pad of the thumb, “Still don’t understand why that’s a bad thing.”
He was almost enchanted by Hanzo’s little irritated sigh, watching the dragon rake a hand through his hair as he struggled to express himself in English. The older man was perfectly fluent in a conversational sense, of course, but when it came to intimacy, he struggled. He hadn’t been raised in a family that had put a great deal of emphasis on expressions of emotion, even when it came to matters of mating and romance. So, while he knew the words intellectually, structuring them out colloquially took him time. He had barely learned to be honest with his feelings in Japanese. Who could expect him to do it well in a second tongue?
A tired expression stole over Hanzo’s regal brow and he finally dared to make direct eye contact with his lover, sparks of conflict dancing in the velveteen auburn of them, “There is little wisdom in building a house upon a foundation of sand.”
Contrary to popular belief, Jesse McCree was not stupid and he was getting the signal loud and clear.
“You’re talkin’ like I’m fixin’ to walk out that door any day now, partner,” he said a touch too fiercely.
“Overwatch will not last forever, yasei-ji . Or our time in it shall not. In this place we are brothers in arms and that is all that is needed. This world asks nothing more of us than that we be willing to bleed for on another. When we must face the world outside again, more is required...things neither you nor I can give each other.”
“Like what?” the cowboy challenged, feeling himself get riled.
Hanzo met Jesse’s growing fire with all the serenity of a sky before a storm, “Children. I can offer you no pups. I am a cast off of a toppled clan, so I can offer you no holdings either.”
Jesse snorted, letting a little bit of his Alpha manners slip. He reached out with big hands, wrapping them around Hanzo’s deceptively slender hips and tugging him over from his isolated corner of the bed. With all the strength in him, he settled on his back and placed his lover into his lap, staring up at him with possessive, liquid heat flaring in his eyes. He dug his hands in until he felt muscle dimple beneath his grip, rumbling so low in his chest that it was more vibration than sound. He slid his flesh hand up to rest low on Hanzo’s belly where children would grow if either of them were capable of bearing them.
“Hell, Hanzo, you think mighty low of yourself if you reckon for one second that you’re some kinda convenience for me. Don’t you go insultin’ me actin’ like I’m just fuckin’ around with you until something better comes along.”
His lover suppressed a gasp at the manhandling, steadying himself with hands on Jesse’s hirsute chest.
He offered the cowboy a wistful little smile, “You are nothing if not pragmatic, Jesse. Can you blame me for thinking so?”
The rumble picked up, “I’m also greedy, Shimada. Darlin’ if you think I’d let a treasure like you go just because I can’t fill your belly, then you don’t know me half so well as you think y’do.”
Hanzo flushed ruddy under the bronze tones of his cheeks, still unused to praise even after throwing his lot in with this ostentatious American. He looked stricken, eyes wide and breath coming in quick catches. He sat perfectly balanced across the splay of the cowboy’s hips like he belonged there, feeling the thundering tattoo of the younger man’s pulse beneath his fingertips, the ache in his own hips from being beneath him not an hour before. His scent was heady as it filled the room, interweaving with the lingering bite of cigarillo smoke.
“...you will still leave,” he murmured, dreamlike, unprepared for the possessive glint in the cowboy’s incendiary stare.
A big hand drifted up to cup his chin between forefinger and thumb, guiding him down as Jesse growled, “And when I do, I’ll take you with me, Shimada. We’ll go out west an’ I’ll see if you turn gold in the sun.”
He pushed his nose up under the hinge of Hano’s jaw, not minding the stubble a bit, “Why, you got somewhere better to be, darlin?”
Slowly and with great care, the archer lowered himself to stretch out completely atop his lover, turning his head so their lips ghosted against each other, “I suppose I do not.”
Jesse’s hand shifted to the back of his neck, pulling him into a kiss so deep that the elder Shimada questioned where he ended and his scruffy American began. He tasted like smoke, bourbon, and something deeper and more primal altogether, something uniquely Jesse McCree that occurred nowhere else in the world. They met each other as equals, neither yielding to nor dominating the other. Hanzo did not fear breaking the sharpshooter under the brunt of his strength, nor did Jesse condescend to treat him as a fragile thing. He was cherished, yes, but hardly breakable.
His American was the first to break the kiss, pulling back and panting, eyes still fierce and yet somehow full of a helpless devotion, “Hanzo Shimada, you are damn well impossible. You are meaner’n an unbroken bronco and prissier than a Baptist on Sunday, but damn if you aren’t mine. Where’d all this come from? Is it ‘cause I don’t want to mate you?”
Hanzo tucked his head up under Jesse’s chin gently and made a soft grunt in the negative. He knew the other man’s reasons for refusing a bonding bite well enough and to be honest, he agreed with him. They were both of them dangerous men, and the prices on their heads were high. There was no guarantee from day to day that someone with the devil’s own luck and a bone to pick wouldn’t get the better of them. Losing someone you loved was hard enough, but losing a mate, someone you were chemically bound to, was something altogether harder to recover from. The grieving could shatter even the strongest alpha. Hanzo and Jesse had ruined enough lives in their short existences that neither of them could bear the idea that one of their deaths would cripple the other.
So they had chosen this way, to love fiercely but unbound.
He felt Jesse tracing the lines of his tattoo, riding the edge of a colourful lightning bolt, and he relaxed further into the bed.
“I am...unused to having things to call my own. It is not how I was raised. Even my skin does not belong to me. It has been a home for the dragons since I was old enough to put needle to flesh.”
He trailed off, letting the implication hang in the air. He had grown better about speaking his feelings, but he would never be perfect at it. Not all wounds healed clean, after all. Sometimes all that was left to men like them was to accept their own brokenness. It fell to them to understand that all they could do was pick up the pieces and put themselves back together again, even if they weren’t exactly as they were before.
As a boy, Hanzo had learned of an art form of his people wherein broken porcelain would be repaired with veins of lacquer, an old thing made new and spider-webbed with gold. No one attempted to pretend it had never been broken in the first place, instead celebrating the changes it had endured to continue existing. It was part of what had enamoured Hanzo to the half-feral cowboy currently wrapped around him. He wore his scars with his head held high and charged boldly onward. He acknowledged the futility of looking back and so focused on the next sunrise with the sort of passionate abandon the archer was sure he would never fully grasp.
Chapped lips brushed his forehead and their little world lapsed into comfortable silence. Nothing more needed to be said. The air was clear of all but the moonlight, smoke, and the gentle crash of the waves far below.
Author’s Notes
- Welcome back, OverFam! I’m still unpacking from the convention and sorting through things, so I wasn’t quite ready to dive back into Guardian Angel fully. Instead, here’s a bit of a side piece for my fellow McHanzo lovers.
- The title comes from a form of Japanese artwork where broken pottery is mended with liquid lacquer mixed with powdered gold and silver. It celebrates the concept of ‘wabi-sabi’, or (loosely) the love of imperfect things.
- Yasei-ji: feral child/wild child (loosely)
- A note on A/B/O for Guardian Angel: Alphas, while the most virile dynamic, lack any form of fertility. It’s one of the reasons A/A pairings are more rare.
- This side-story occurs before “Wake Me Up” and falls mostly anywhere along the main story.
- As always, for my silent readers, my vocal readers, and my lurkers, you’re all wonderful. I hope I’ve written something that can bring you joy.
- This story was written on behalf of Daximed, who wanted fluff, but got angsty romance instead. I think I'm allergic to happy.
- The playlist used to set tone for this story consisted of: "Trouble" by Avicii, "Broken Arrows" by Avicii, "King" by Lauren Aquilina, "The Consort" by Rufus Wainwright, "Unsteady" by X Ambassadors, "Organs" by Of Monsters and Men, "Medicine" by Daughter, and "Safe and Sound" with the Civil Wars.