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The ocean in Yokohama is too calm, too placid. McCree was once lulled to sleep by the muted roar of Mediterranean waves on the Gibraltar coast; listening to the water gently lap against the concrete docks, he becomes restless.
Maybe it’s just jet lag keeping him awake. Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe it’s hopelessness. Yokohama is too busy, too bustling, for Hanzo to be here. The only reason McCree is even here is because he’s clinging to the off-hand comment Genji made before, Well, my brother has always liked the ocean.
If he had the time, if he wasn’t shackled to the steadfast hand of a clock ticking down (he can hear Angela’s voice in his mind, I told you smoking all those years was going to come back and bite you!) , he would sail the oceans of the world for one more glimpse of the man he once called amor. As it is, he’s scrambling to visit any major locations just on the coast of Japan, asking anyone who might have information, have you see a man with a dragon tattoo on his arm.
Someone inevitably remarks that his Japanese is quite good for an American, and he must have studied well in school. McCree never went to school past eighth grade, when three of his five siblings pulled him into Deadlock and set him on the path to infamy. All his Japanese is learned from smoky afternoons, Hanzo sitting cross-legged on the floor across from him, the two of them slinging Spanish and Japanese vocabulary back and forth like a baseball. Hanzo struggles with rolling his R’s properly in the back of his tongue. McCree struggles with the quick cadence of Japanese.
“Bombilla,” Hanzo says.
McCree thinks for a while and responds, “Denkyu.” He follows it up with “Mado,” lingering still too long on the vowels even after Hanzo shakes his head and taps his fingers on the floor to staccato syllables.
Hanzo responds “ventana,” then in the same breath “Amanecer.”
“Hinode,” McCree says, to the tap of Hanzo’s fingers. “Tsukamatte.”
Hanzo breathes out. “Abrázame. Bésame.”
McCree never needs to be told twice. They play this game often, words in each other’s native tongue stringing into phrases, expanding into sentences. It always ends with McCree scooting across the floor to press a kiss against Hanzo’s cheek, shoulder, chest, anywhere Hanzo will allow him to, his lips writing a promise into inked skin that no language could hope to capture.
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McCree has never been good at keeping promises.
The clock reads 3:03 am. In Albuquerque, it’s just past noon. McCree is still wide awake, tossing on his futon. At this point he might as well just go walking in the city at night, asking after Hanzo.
There’s no guarantee Hanzo will be here. There’s no guarantee Hanzo is even on this side of the world. But McCree has nobody to blame but himself for not knowing - after all, he was the one who left in the middle of the night because he couldn’t bear to say a proper goodbye. In the years after Overwatch disbanding he always wondered how Hanzo must have felt watching him sneak out of the room when the night was darkest with no moon.
In replaying his exit over and over, he thinks he might have heard Hanzo breathe quédate conmigo, stay with me, but it doesn’t matter; he never turns around, and Hanzo lets him go, lets him run away from the best thing that’s ever happened to him because at the time McCree couldn’t bear to face his own emotions and all the fears that came attached to them. Hanzo let him go because Hanzo was trying to run too; from how quickly he’d disappeared in the months afterwards, he’s done a much better job.
In his imagination, in his longing, McCree doesn’t leave, and he doesn’t let Hanzo run away either. They fly to the New Mexico countryside and buy a small farmhouse there; in the mornings they tend to animals and crops, and in the afternoons they play their language game. Eventually they’re both fluent but they do it anyway, sitting across from each other as a calico stretches in Hanzo’s lap.
Boots thunder down the hall and stop outside his door. Someone is counting in Japanese, ichi, ni, san, but by the time they kick down the door McCree already has Peacekeeper aimed and ready. Bam, down goes one thug, crashing in a heap on the floor. Bam, bam, down go the two staring at the corpse. Bam, one more for the first, because McCree could see him moving for his gun still. He’s not young any more and he thinks the first shot might have been compromised by the splintered wood of the door.
Three more flood in. Bam, Bam, down go the first two, but that’s six shots and even though McCree has new bullets in his hand already, reloading takes time. He rolls to the other side of the room as two shots land where he was sitting a half-second earlier. He lifts up Peacekeeper but falters; peeking from the low collar of the bounty hunter’s shirt, is a dragon’s snout.
Not the Shimada dragon, and not in the right spot. But it makes McCree hesitate anyway, and that’s enough time for his opponent to line up his shot and fire.
Bam. Peacekeeper drops him. But it doesn’t matter, not now. McCree looks down at his nightshirt and sees blood burbling from between his ribs, staining into his shirt like ink hitting water. Because his lungs weren’t fucked enough, and because he wasn’t already running desperately out of time.
The hotel doesn’t allow smoking, but McCree reaches over to the bedside table and grabs a cigar anyway. His lighter almost refuses to catch, but finally sparks in his trembling, bloodstained hands. He leans back against the wall and takes shallow puffs of the cigar, coughing blood down his chin every few breaths.
Outside, it begins to rain. If McCree cared or could move, he’d close the window because the maids will already have enough to clean up tomorrow morning. But instead he sits at the foot of the bed and listens to the sound of raindrops hitting the ocean waves. Water runs from the window frame. It’s dripping into the room, a steady beat against the tatami floor.
In the raindrops, McCree hears Hanzo tapping his fingers. Tap-tap-tap, keeping time as McCree tries his best to keep up with the tempo of the Japanese language as he counts to ten. Ichi, ni, san, shi, his accent makes him lag behind and Hanzo makes him start again, tap-tap-tap, Ichi, ni, san, shi, he’s lagged behind again and Hanzo sighs.
“Jesse,” Hanzo says, and if McCree had the energy he’d sit up, because in the smoky darkness of the room, he can almost seen the outline of Hanzo in front of him, leaning over his listless body. “Talk from the tip of your lungs, not from the bottom of your stomach,” Hanzo advises, and then orders him to count backwards from ten. His breath smells like cigar smoke, but he has never smoked a cigar.
Tap, tap, tap, he taps next McCree’s hand, he taps slower this time, or at least to McCree’s perception it’s slower. McCree starts counting backwards. Ju, kyu, hachi, shichi, he’s only keeping up with the beats because Hanzo cuts off his drawl with a quick kiss if he goes too long, roku, go, shi, Hanzo looking as young as beautiful as McCree last remembers him, san, ni, Hanzo almost tangible in his lap, breath hot against his cheek.
Ichi, and Hanzo smiles at him and tells him quédate conmigo, stay with me, and in that single, suspended moment McCree keeps the promises he kissed into Hanzo’s skin; he turns around in that dark room in Gibraltar and goes back to Hanzo’s arms, and in the morning they fly out together to a farmhouse in the New Mexico countryside.