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The mission was supposed to be simple.
Sweep, clear, hold. The same thing the team have done a thousand times before. The same thing Hanzo’s sat in on for a good portion of those times.
Hanzo takes the high ground as always. Nocks an arrow, hand steady and eyes eagle-sharp over the truss. At first, doesn’t take much notice of D.Va. She can handle herself, has told him as much in several instances of explosive chatter that reminded him too much of Genji. Hanzo’s opinion of a child, young woman, fighting are off no matter. He respects her word, and has seen it ring true with his own two eyes. A young lady worthy of respect. Hanzo mostly acknowledges her safety through the measure of animated chatter over comms and the hum of her mech in the street below.
It’s why the sudden, stuttering quiet has him pulling an arrow to his cheek, ready and eyeing at the expanse below where Hana’s seemingly lost one…something on the right side of her mech and is suddenly, dangerously exposed.
Hanzo mutters the location across the line, figures Hana is doing the same. The main objective shifting to ‘cover her until she’s no longer in the direct line of fire’. He does so precisely, as always. Eyes scanning across the quiet expanse with an ear open for gunfire background noise.
It’s this secondary objective that allows him to see the man before even Hana does.
He comes out of nowhere. Two heads taller, all muscles and metallic plate, brandishing some kind of pipe like a club. Hanzo acts before he thinks. Mind blanked by duty. Loosens two quick arrows into the brutes shoulder. It doesn’t slow him. Doesn’t stop him. Hitting like a graze across rippling flesh. Hana drops out of her mech to move back and put distance between them. And that’s the moment Hanzo drops down from the roof without thought.
It’s not particularly elegant. Hardly the cold precise archer the team have pinned him to be. No, this is a man throwing his body into the teeth of something much larger because he will not let a child be struck down in front of him.
The brute shifts his focus from the girl to him. Swings wide. Hanzo gives up on distance and goes in close as he dares. Throwing his bow up as a shield to block the first swing. It doesn’t survive the second so he throws a punch, trying to think of the days where close combat was his forte. It lands, and there’s a momentary stagger before the pipe comes down in a blur of rust and weight. Hanzo twists, but it’s not fast enough. The steel slams into his ribs with an ugly crack that rips its way through his entire body. Hanzo can’t even yell out, the blow ripping the air from his lungs in agonys crushing fist. Like a towel, wrung dry. The remaining pieces of his bow clatter from his hands.
The man doesn’t allow a hint of breathing room, a moment of respite. Brutality and desperation and nothing else. Relentless. Another swing catches Hanzo across the face and the world goes a popping red-black. Hanzo’s stomach drops. Throat gurgles in copper enough to drown. Nose bursting open, hot and immediate, splattering down his lips and teeth and spraying reddish spittle mix across the air as he goes down.
Hanzo doesn’t stay down. Can’t stay down. Pushes himself into a half-height crouch and lunging a shoulder into the brutes stomach. Hanzo knows he can’t knock him down, not at his height even with his bulk. No, to shove him back. To buy Hana a breath of space to shift herself further away.
Closing both of his hands around the pipe weapon, they grapple for it. A losing game but a valiant attempt. It’s wretched free from Hanzo’s grip with strength alone and wrapped around his face a second time. This time something does crack, centred in his cheek. Pain blossoms ugly across the right side of his head. Eye already closing in fat, swelling increments.
The ground comes into focus in blackening vignettes. Hanzo falls awkwardly, twisting in the air at the heavy drop. His prosthetic ankle twists and shrieks in a grating noise as it folds uselessly in the chaos. So Hanzo, still fighting, drags himself up on his forearms, chest screaming with every blood splattering heave.
The brute raises the pipe again, a killing blow but Hanzo’s fuelled with raw adrenaline and spite. He rolls, nothing left but bare hands. Hanzo lifts them all the same. The strike hits him in the shoulder. Then the ribcage, again. Blows blocked with strong forearms and then not. A jagged pain then release.
Hanzo catches the pipe once more, swinging blindly with his in tact prosthesis, managing to bring the brute down with him. They tumble in the dirt. Hanzo ends up on top through adrenaline or rage or some new feeling. Knuckles splitting as he strikes the mans face again and again and again-
Tracer’s voice suddenly cracks across the comms. Incoming backup. Hanzo doesn’t hear. His ears are ringing, his mind screaming, the brute beneath him unconscious or dead.
Zarya hauls Hanzo off and away like a doll. The fight is over. Over. Angela floating into his vision in a golden haze. People are swarming around him, and all Hanzo can register is the blood on his hands. That and a voice, a recognisable voice, echoing in his ears:
“Brother? Brother, answer me! Hanzo! Hanzo-“
The sound cuts like a blade. Bloody hands trembling. Hanzo’s chest seizes with something deeper than broken ribs. He can’t answer. Genji is screaming and he can’t answer. Breath too ragged and mouth too full of red.
It’s cut off when Angela plucks the comm from his ear with quick, professional understanding. “Not now,” she murmurs, and the screams are slipped into her pocket.
Hanzo doesn’t feel relief as she stabilises his neck. Shines little lights into his eyes. No relief. Just absence. Absence and emptiness and blood, blood, blood.
Hanzo suddenly grips Mercy’s arm in sticky red fingerprints, lips moving before sound catches up, mind entirely somewhere else.
“Don’t-” a ragged breath, “Genji…Hana, don’t let them s-see. Not like this.”
Angels scan’s his face with her brows furrowed. Professionalism and sorrow in one. “They will not see. Not now.”
Hanzo sags under a soft brush against his sternum. And the world finally fades into acid spill and starlight.
The medbay is a mess of blurry blues and whites and low tone hums.
For Hanzo, at least in those first few days, it’s nothing but sound and blurs and muffled voices. Faces morphing into skin tones blobs. Features lost. Like shapes glimpsed in a foggy mirror. Hanzo’s eyes, or eye, cracks open from time to time, but grows heavy with the weight of sedatives after mere moments.
Pain is there but it’s dull. Lingering agony in his ribs and face and skull. The drugs make it an echo, a wave. In that wave Hanzo floats in and out like a tide.
A hand anchors him. Cool against his head. Thumb brushing careful patterns into his hairline, smoothing strays back. Slow, steady strokes. Not the clinical touch of a healer. More so…quiet. Personal. Accompanied by a murmuring voice with a hazy, robotic vibration along the low tones. Even Hanzo in his sea of drugs can recognise it: Genji.
Sometimes another voice joins. Higher, brighter but also wavering, gentle and young. Hana. Hanzo can’t decipher her words, but he recognises the way Genji soothes her. He was always good with children.
Hanzo’s dry lips crack as they wrap around the syllables. “Hana…”
He doesn’t realise he’s spoken it aloud until Genji’s gentle thumb stroke grows a little firmer.
“Hush, brother. She is safe. Rest.”
That is enough. Hanzo drifts again
Later, maybe days or minuets or hours. There’s a different tone. A sharper voice. Something clipped and scolding but not unkind. A woman’s voice. Hanzo cannot understand it, but the warm sounds fills something within him he thought long broken.
Hanzo’s eyes crack, and he captures a soft glance on dark flowing fabric and lined features. Hanzo’s lips shape the word, simple and soft and questioning: “…Mother?”
The room stills. Genji’s cool palm freezes against his forehead.
Ana’s breath catches, and then is released in a slow, composed exhale, the sound carrying an ache all of its own. Then, she leans forward and adjusts the blanket over his shoulders with a rare, mothering gentleness.
“No, habibi,” she whispers, “but I am here.”
And that is enough.
Time passes.
Hanzo feels himself being lifted forward, strong arms bracing under his shoulders, gown pulled away to expose the black and blue expanse of his spine and ribcage. Hanzo tries to plant his feet deliriously at the shift, but they’re not there. His body lurches at that, a sound slipping out without his consent.
“Easy, Hanzo,” Genji murmurs, breath steady, chin on Hanzos crown as he held him heavily against his chest.“It’s only me.”
Angela’s voice follows from somewhere behind him, clinical narration, “hold him still while I treat his back?”
Fabric peels away from the ruined skin. Then, the cool sting of antiseptic across red hot welts. Hanzo breathes through the agony of it, muscles trembling.
Genji holds him steady against his chest. Looking off somewhere past Hanzo’s shoulder and down his spine. Face plate off and messy, twisting scar tissue morphing into a gentle, concerned expression. The welting pain across his back has Hanzo in a different time. A different place. A mental state where he needs his brother and, after so long, he’s finally here.
Genji strains his ears at first. The blink-and-you’ll miss it sound between one breath and the next. So faint Genji can scarcely believe such a sound came from Hanzo of all people.
“…Genji.”
More whisper than words.
After a long moment, again, “Genji.”
Genji freezes, then shifts Hanzo in his grip, so his cheek squishes gently against the plating of his chest. “I’m here, brother.”
“Genji.”
Not fear. Nor confusion. Just repetition. A quiet chant to soothe and ground in times of little control. Hanzo’s hand brushes faintly against the plating of Genji’s elbow where it grips him under the armpits.
“Genji.”
Angela glances up from her work, almost tender.
Angela had finally let Hanzo go after three days of close observation. Hanzo left the away he entered: head high, expression unreadable, and gait staggering but steady. Ribs and nose bound tight. One prosthetic leg was still being repaired or replaced or something of the sort, so Hanzo navigates with crutches under his armpits and raw, clawing determination.
He tells himself he’s fine. All is said and done and finished and nothing particularly remarkable happened.
The base doesn’t agree.
Conversations die when he enters then mess hall. Lucio looks up from his tray and whistles something low. Even Zarya gives him a long, unblinking look before a sharp nod.
Hanzo ignores them all. Fetches his food in two awkward, stilted trips, and sits down at the table like the stares don’t bore holes into his shoulder blades.
He soon realises it’s the same everywhere. In the corridors, Tracer offers to carry things fore him like he’s some kind of old man. Even Cassidy gives him a wide berth and a rare, banter-less silence.
It’s baffling, honestly. Hanzo has done nothing remarkable. Fought, lost, survived. The rhythm of battle everyone on the base knows well. Hanzo, admittedly, doesn’t always get people. But the difference in glances across the team have him doubting something ingrained.
“Hanzo!”
When Hana finally corners him in the corridor, he almost feels relief at the chatter.
Turning, slower than he’d like, he sees her jogging up to him. In her arms is a…basket? A monstrous, ridiculous thing stuffed with all sorts.
Hana falls into step with his stunted pace. “I brought you something, don’t laugh, yeah?”
“I would never,” Hanzo replies dryly, then, “what is it?”
“A gift basket, duh,” ah, he sees Genji in her again. “I dunno what you like so I asked Genji and he laughed at me! Can you believe that?”
Hanzo nods seriously, “he knows no respect.”
“Right? Anyway, he said to jus’ fill it with junk cause you’re too polite to throw it out. I think he’s setting me up but whatever,” she digs in the basket, “it’s mostly teas ’n chocolates n’ those little crossword puzzle books for old people. Oh and, like, two bottles of sake, you old alcoholic-“
She rambles on as she walks him to his room. Then waits for him to open the door before shoving the basket into his arms before he has a chance to protest.
Hanzo grunts at the heft of the basket, “thank you.”
“Yeah, well don’t mention it.”
“It is…excessive.”
“Excessive is the point! You saved me, you don’t get to argue.”
Hanzo exhales at that. A little breath through the nose that might constitute a laugh. Thoughts of a green-haired young man trailing behind him in the hall with tales of parties and dodgy tourist shops, shoving trinkets onto his shelf next to his study books like little gifts.
Hana looks down at her feet. Scuffs her sneaker along the floor.
Then, finally, he crux of the matter, what she really came to say.
“Look…y’know, I was really scared. During the fight.”
Hanzo moves into his room. Puts the basket on his desk before sitting on the bed and, in a moment of gentle kindness, patting the spot beside him. “You had every right to be.”
Hana slumps herself down, “and it’s not like I don’t appreciate it, I do! It’s just, I dunno, I thought I was done for and then you come in like that. All…scary. Watching you get beaten to death wasn’t exactly part of the plan.”
She laughs dryly, then shrugs. “Anyway I was scared.”
Silence stretches out for a moment. Then Hanzo’s voice breaks it. Low and raw. “I’m sorry.”
Hana blinks. “Sorry? For what?”
“For frightening you. For leaving you with another memory of blood an violence. It’s a weight you shouldn’t have to bear.”
A beat.
Hana laughs.
“You’re apologizing for saving my life? You really are a hard ass!”
She laughs at him. And Hanzo finds himself softly laughing at the absurdity of it, too.
Hana snorts, then settles into something softer, “Look, man. You didn’t…traumatise me, or whatever. You kept me alive. And that’s what I’m gonna remember. You did good.”
Hana leaves Hanzo to sit with that when she gets up, “enjoy y’gift basket. Them crosswords won’t complete themselves, old man.”
And off she goes.