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Rain in Guangzhou was a never-ending sound muffling the city in a cloud of white noise. Hanzo had been born and raised in a similar climate, and the autumns at the Gibraltar base were not forgiving either, yet something about the weather was more extreme than the ones he had previously lived in.
Perhaps it was the humidity and the heat that stuck to their skin and beaded into droplets of sweat, making the atmosphere tight. Cole was certainly not taking the weather well, and he was vocal about it. Although it seemed he was only jesting, as he always did, overstating his unease in an attempt at humor. “Feeling like I’m walking through soup.” He had said at some point, which Hanzo admittedly did not fully understand but took for granted, that it must mean something about the weather.
He had been vocal about the annoyance with the weather up until around an hour ago, and it was clear that something had shifted. His silence gave way to the rain, which grew deafeningly loud. A look in his direction showed he was deep in thought, lost enough not to notice Hanzo's look. He called his name. It still felt wrong to utter the man’s name so casually, but to Hanzo’s utter disbelief, Cole seemed to think of him as no less than an equal.
Cole only hummed an answer. This was bad. Something was occupying the cowboy’s mind, and Hanzo wanted to dissect it.
Cole claimed that nothing was. The answer came too slowly and was followed by an unconvincing attempt at a smile. Hanzo continued to look at him until the smile slowly stirred and rippled into nothingness.
It had taken Hanzo some time to understand that Cole filled the silence because he disliked what might emerge from it. When left uninterrupted, he produced stories, jokes, observations of little importance, anything that could occupy the space between himself and another person. This silence was therefore not an absence. It was a deliberate construction, and whatever Cole had placed behind it was important enough to require protection.
Hanzo asked again.
Cole rubbed his palms together. His right hand passed over the metal of his left, producing a faint mechanical whirr beneath the sound of the rain. He eventually admitted that he had something to do that evening.
“My shot.”
Cole had spoken of his testosterone before with the casualness of someone discussing an old maintenance ritual. It was neither secret nor confession. It had been part of his life for nearly three decades, which only made the present unease more difficult to explain.
Hanzo asked if they should look for a pharmacy around here, and Cole gestured toward his bag, saying that the vial and needles were packed in there.
Hanzo was reminded of a younger Genji, burning with fever, avoiding injections. But Cole had stitched Hanzo up himself once, and his hands were steady and precise that day. It was consequently where he first started to feel a gravitation towards him. Not because he could fill the role of a field medic, no. It was the panic in his voice as he inspected the gash on his shoulder, the downturn of his eyebrows that he had only seen on his mother’s face when he returned from training with an injury.
The weight of his thoughts slowly sank his heart as a stone dropped in the vast depths of the ocean, and with it, he slowly raised his hand to place it on Cole’s; as slow as the sinking of that stone, and as deliberate as that too.
“Please tell me what is bothering you.”
A Shimada never asks. But this was Cole, and father had been dead for years, he reminded himself.
Cole’s half-lidded eyes drooped low, and his long lashes cast pointed shadows on his freckled cheeks.
“Everyone did this for me. Or watched me do it.” His voice was coming from a place far beneath the usual mask. Hanzo almost didn’t recognize it, but he remembered shortly after that it was the same one as the night they kissed. Worn and tired.
Cole continued, “And they’re all gone now. All of ‘em in different ways.” Hanzo counted the ridges on Cole’s fist with his thumb, waiting for him to untangle his heart. “Y’know, this reminds me of Ashe. Of everyone, really, but mostly her.”
“Because we are together?”
“Yeah.” Cole sighed a regretful breath. “She bought me vials. We’d hit a train and made more money than we could count and… and my birthday was near.” He laughed, shallowly. “She bought me a pack of vials and told me to never be sorry again.” Hanzo’s hand stopped on Cole’s hand, urging him to explain the latter part. “Sorry for being who I was. When we first mingled and all I panicked.” He could imagine it: a young boy caught between lust and judgment. Jealousy bubbled in Hanzo’s gut, not because he wanted Cole to himself, but rather something ashier and more ancient. The knowledge that he would never get to see forty years of Cole’s life.
“Cole,” Hanzo called. And Cole’s gaze did not waver from the blank point on the ground. “I am not others.”
A small laugh, hollow as a bark, left Cole. “Mina wasn’t others. Gabe. Everyone…” Then he doubled over himself, his hands holding his head and his elbows on his knees. Hand taken from Hanzo’s grip. “Christ. What am I even getting to?”
Hanzo lowered himself beside the hotel’s old and worn couch, near Cole’s body, and asked him to look at him. Cole did not, so he asked again, more conscious this time. The cadence almost a mirror to how his father used to order. This time he obeyed. His face was still partially hidden between his hands, his eyes wet but furious with themselves for it. Hanzo had seen men look less ashamed as they begged for their lives.
“Do not mourn me while I am still sitting beside you.”
Cole attempted to explain that this was not what he meant, that the words were meant only to comfort Hanzo, and that he was not the one in need of them. Everyone had meant to stay, he said. Or perhaps Cole had once believed they would. The distinction no longer seemed important to him, but was important to Hanzo. Their absence did not mean that their affection had been false. Mina had not chosen death. The others had been separated from Cole by the knife of violence and the slow buildup of wounds that made returning more difficult than leaving. Even Ashe’s gift had not become a lie merely because she was no longer the woman beside him.
The right thing to do for a lover must have been to tell Cole that things were different now, an empty sweetness that left a person hollow and more fearful than before. He had never found that a useful thing to say to a man about to drown, and he did not think Cole, in this moment, was very different from one.
"I will not tell you they will come back." His hand found Cole's again. "But I promise you that I will stay, and that if it were to change, you will hear it from me, so that you need not invent a cruel reason for it yourself."
Hanzo watched Cole’s gaze sharpen. “You’re scary, Han.” The sincerity in Cole’s tone clenched his heart, and Hanzo found himself passing a thumb over Cole’s cheek, catching a runaway tear. “I do not take promises lightly.”
“I know. That’s what scares me.”
For a moment, Hanzo did not understand. Then the meaning opened before him with cruel simplicity. Cole was not frightened because he doubted the promise. He was frightened because he believed it.
Hanzo’s thumb remained beneath Cole’s eye. Another tear reached it, warm at first, then cooling rapidly against his skin. It seemed strange that grief could leave the body in something so small. Cole inclined his head into Hanzo’s palm. The movement was almost imperceptible and seemed to shame him as soon as he had made it. He began to pull away. Hanzo’s hand moved behind his neck and drew him forward instead.
Cole’s forehead met his shoulder with softness. He folded against Hanzo without grace, but Hanzo caught him and closed his arms around Cole’s back.
Cole’s hands followed next; the living one closed around the back of Hanzo’s shirt; the metal one took hold more carefully, without allowing its fingers to tighten.
Hanzo had been taught that the purpose of the arms was to enact the will. They drew the bow, carried the sword, and held an enemy still while the blade entered him. Even an embrace, he now understood, was an act of will. He could not keep Cole from being abandoned by the dead or altered by the living. He could only place his body around him now and refuse to move.
Outside, the rain struck the windows with senseless persistence. It swallowed the uneven sounds of Cole’s breathing, making the city disappear completely behind it.
After some time, Cole lifted his face. A loose strand of hair had fallen across his wet cheek. Hanzo gathered it and placed it behind his ear. Such a delicate gesture still felt incompatible with the life he had lived. Yet here was the strand passing between his fingers, and here was Cole, allowing it.
Hanzo drew away slowly enough that the space between their bodies did not resemble an absence.
He stood and crossed the room to retrieve the bag. He lowered it between them and unzipped it, but did not search through its contents.
“Allow me to watch.”