CYOA – Chapter 18

warnings: none

We determined that if anybody would make the first move, it is McCree, rather than Hanzo...

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It is glaringly obvious that something had happened. Hanzo looks even more severe and more… flat out bitchy than usual. Jesse pauses where he has crawled over the large rocks and doesn’t really want to approach if he is honest.

He has a feeling that a bitchy Hanzo will be absolutely insufferable.

“I can leave ya to it,” he calls over, but of course Hanzo waves him closer with the air of a monarch. He is sitting in the shallows of the sea, cold water washing about his legs. He already changed forms. Jesse shudders just watching him sit there in the icy cold, though it looks like Hanzo doesn’t mind it any.

Would Jesse come to be immune to the sharp sting of cold as well? The thought reminds him of how little he knows still. How little progress he has made in figuring out what was happening to him.

He comes a little closer, throwing his backpack to Hanzo. It was filled with clothes again, ones that he hopes were a little more neutral than the last checkered shirt that had people turn around and stare at Hanzo weirdly.

Hanzo doesn’t have much experience in terms of fashion, but he is still looking very disdainful as he pulls out the clothes. He seems to have formed very strong opinions already.

Jesse stands there awkwardly, hands folded in front of him and trying not to stare when Hanzo stands up with a surprising amount of dignity for a naked man out in the open. He instead stares at the sea, feeling the same pull that he had for some time now. It is not as needy anymore, but the feeling is there, itching under his skin.

He moves his fingers against each other, feeling like there should be water running between them. He startles when he actually does feel something there. He looks down, staring at his hands, horror overcoming him when he spreads the digits and thin, translucent skin stretches between them. His heart is running a mile a minute, the sound of the water crashing against the shore suddenly very loud in his ears.

Not louder than Hanzo, though.

“I am done. Let us go.”

Startled, Jesse turns to stare at him. He’s not sure what his face looks like, but it is enough to give Hanzo who is busy carding through his long ink black hair to pause and study him.

“What.”

Jesse lifts his hands, fingers spread, but when he looks, there is nothing between them anymore. He can just see Hanzo standing there between his middle and ring finger and staring at him like he’s lost his mind.

Maybe he has.

“Nothing…” he murmurs and breathes through deeply. He scrubs across his face with both hands, then tries to let the weird feeling fall off of him. “You ready to go…” home? “...to my place?”

Hanzo squints at him slightly.

“If you insist.”

“Yeah, it’ll be… easier, I think. I prepared for it and got a lot of stuff there, you know?” he looks over the sea once more, almost waiting for a shock of green hair to appear. “And this is… okay? For you to be leavin’ for a longer while?”

Hanzo sniffs derisively. He turns away without glancing at the water, making his way over the large boulders.

“It is. Come.”

.o.

Hanzo smells of the sea. Jesse has been aware of it on some level, but it really drives home when he pushes his door open with one arm and stands to the side to let Hanzo enter.

The sea...dragon… is shorter than Jesse, and when he pushes past him, Jesse can see the fine white salt crystals in his hair. For just a second, it feels like he is standing on the beach again, the scent intense enough to make him reel. Then Hanzo is inside, and everything goes back to normal.

Or, as normal as it can be when a supernatural creature is stalking the inside of a flat for the first time, looking at everything critically and with a disdain that Jesse thinks is absolutely uncalled for.

He closes the door. Watching Hanzo make his rounds and inspect everything is like watching that stray cat Jesse once took in for a couple weeks until some better caretakers came along for her. He inexplicably has the thought that he doesn’t want to give this stray away, though.

He clears his throat.

“So? What do ya think?”

Hanzo throws him a sharp little glance out of the corner of his eye. Jesse feels like he’s been cut to the bone. He rubs at his chest and goes to his kitchen table to sit down, feeling faint.

“It is an odd living choice,” Hanzo finally decrees. He has started to grasp the backrest of the couch, gently squeezing it in his fingers before he carefully lets himself sink down on the place that Jesse spends most of his time; browsing the internet, watching movies… jerking off.

He flushes dully and puts his head in his hands. Dear Lord where was this going? Hanzo is not paying him much attention. He is bouncing slightly on the seat and then stands again to explore the rest.

“What’s that noise?” he asks eventually, a frown on his face. Jesse stares at him with a frown until it clicks that Hanzo is talking about the radio softly playing in the background. He basically never turns it off at this point, the noise too soft to bother him.

“Ah… the radio,” he says and twists in his chair to point at the small black device in the corner of his kitchen space. Hanzo stalks closer. The way he still pulls his knees up just a tad too high makes him look simultaneously like a supermodel and a flamingo; it’s a weird combination.

He leans with his elbows on the counter and tilts his head to listen to the last bit of news before a song starts to play. Jesse watches him stand in place, patiently listening for a bit over two minutes and not making a sound. When the song ends and a new one begins, he slowly pulls back again, his posture a lot more relaxed than before, fingers lightly spread out on the edge of the countertop.

“Genji would like this,” he says after a moment. He sounds… weird. Melancholic. Jesse leans back slightly, trying to catch sight of his expression, but Hanzo’s face is as stoic as ever.

“I guess so. It’s something new, huh? You guys don’t like… uh… sing?”

He feels stupid for asking, and the way Hanzo looks at him he is thinking the same thing. Jesse clears his throat and stands.

“Come on. I’ll show you the shower. You can get some of that salt out of your hair and I’m gonna cook for us while you’re doing that.”

.o.

It takes a bit of willpower to leave Hanzo alone and not stand in the doorway and gawk at him as he got naked in Jesse’s bathroom and stepped into the shower stall that had kind of freaked him out at first – even if he did not admit to it when Jesse asked him.

Jesse’s thoughts are with him while he is starting up on some chili. He hadn’t planned on it, but he suddenly needs something warm and hearty that would calm him down. Chili never failed on delivering, but it also wasn’t the quickest dish, so when Hanzo comes back out, brushing his hair with a brush he had pilfered out of Jesse’s cabinets, Jesse is still very much in the middle of everything.

Hanzo is a… surprisingly easy companion. He just sits down and quietly watches Jesse work. He doesn’t ask any questions, he just judges with unimpressed looks.

When the prep work is done, and the chili just needs to do its thing on the stove top, Jesse turns and looks at Hanzo, rubbing his hands together as if he were cold.

“So.”

Hanzo’s dark brows lift and he looks at him expectantly. Jesse inhales deeply.

“So,” he says again and comes closer, pulling out a chair next to Hanzo and turning it in the process to sit on it the wrong way round, chest pressing against the backrest as he opens the cuff of his checkered shirt and starts to roll up the sleeve, showing off the tattoo like slashes on his forearm.

“I wanna find out what this means. Like… for me an’ my life,” Jesse says seriously.

Hanzo has leaned forward, his dark eyes on the mark. Time stretches, and the longer Jesse has Hanzo’s undivided focus on him, the more nervous he becomes for some reason.

“I do, too,” Hanzo says eventually. He reaches out with both hands, and slowly curls one around Jesse’s wrist from underneath to keep him steady, while the other drags fingers along the ink black gashes.

Jesse stares at the sight of Hanzo’s sharp talons so close to his veins and wonders if he can feel just how fast his heart is thumping right now. Hanzo is leaning in so far that his nose is almost brushing Jesse’s skin. He rubs his fingers along the gashes. Jesse has no idea what he is looking for.

He does find his thoughts wandering, though, wondering how Hanzo’s long hair might feel in his fist. What it would take to shatter his cool outer shell.

Jesse blinks profusely. He’s not usually pulled by his dick that hard. Was it just one more side effect of whatever venom Hanzo had pumped into him?

“We will have enough time to find out, I suppose,” Hanzo suddenly announces and sits up again. He takes his fingers from the gashes, but not his hand from around Jesse’s wrist, he notices.

He is burning up from the inside, it feels like. Burning up like… his chili.

He curses and jerks from his chair, pulling his arm from Hanzo’s grasp. He hurries toward the stove and begins to profusely stir and scrub along the bottom of the large pot, also using the moment to just… breathe and think. It’s been a hot minute since he’s last had a hot guy in his flat, and he begins to feel like he’s somewhat… ah… pent up.

He glances behind him to Hanzo.

“Enough time…?” he says when it finally clicks what Hanzo has said. “What do you mean?”

“I will spend the night. Maybe two. I will see,” Hanzo says with the prim self-assurance of a monarch.

Jesse’s mouth opens and closes uselessly.

Pictures of him not having himself under control and making Hanzo lash out in annoyance skitter through his head.

“What do you mean? Won’t your brother be… I don’t know… concerned?”

Hanzo’s face does a weird thing where it seems to shut down. He stands, fingers pressed against Jesse’s table.

“Let that be my concern,” he says calmly, then turns and starts to inspect more of Jesse’s flat.

And that… was that.