#;;threaded

[ 竜 ] –         Gabriel had already given him the permission. Despite the look of confusion that played plainly on his face. Of course, what did he expect. It was a strange request, and one seemingly so out of the blue. And if he were to be completely honest, Genji wasn’t sure what possessed him to prompt it.

It was a realization that had struck him not that long ago, that there was a place where he could feel the way he used to. It was now a feeling limited to what remained of his face. It was something he only remembered as he laid against a pillow, and the cotton of the cool, welcoming sheets rubbed across the skin of his scarred cheek. Somehow, he found comfort in this revelation.

At least until he found himself requesting it of someone, rather than indulging it on the textures of textiles. 

The anxiety has already begun to sink in its claws. Even now as Gabriel was staring at him, patient, yet expectantly. 

Genji shakes his head. Its an attempt to rattle the absurdity of it all from his mind. 

Then again, his entire situation was absurd, wasn’t it?

Finally, he grips his mask. Why he’s so hesitant to remove it, he’s not sure. This isn’t the first time he’s bared his face to Gabriel. Nor the second. There’s been a multitude of times he’s left himself vulnerable to this man, even if many of those times included the crashing of mouths and teeth, and panting breath. He knew what to expect, what lay beneath that bend of metal, and yet he still gazed at it with fondness even when Genji himself could barely stand to look in a mirror.

But he does. There’s the hiss and pop of the locking mechanism, and he works it free, helmet and all, to expose his scarred face, and an unruly crop of black hair.

The smile he offers Gabriel is lopsided, but there’s still an uncharacteristic shyness lurking in his dark eyes. He tries to squelch it down as he settles himself across those broad thighs. 

“Don’t laugh.” It comes out as more of a plea than any sort of command as he takes the commander’s hand in his own. There’s a moment in which he studies it, taking note of the way the callouses discolor his palm and fingers, and the lines and creases that make Gabriel so organic, so human. 

@coyotefaced

[ 竜 ] –         There was an old saying that every soul in the South passed through the city of Atlanta, Georgia before going to heaven. Genji may have found the saying fitting, had he ever heard it before. Though it was a regional flair that hadn’t quite escaped that part of the United States, nor really stood the test of time. Though it should have. The metropolis had long swallowed it’s neighbors, the smaller names like Marietta and Decatur had long become more or less boroughs than separate entities, their lines blurred in the towering of high rises and weaving public transit tracks. Perhaps another fifty years, and it could have very well taken over the better part of the state. Wouldn’t that be a thought? It was a wonder that it wasn’t every soul in the world.

It might have posed and interesting notion to mull over as he sat there, perched atop a golden flame that served as a herald for a sports event that was nearly a century ago, now. Yet it seemed well maintained, aside from the wear of rust and chipped paint that had yet to be addressed on this round. The cyborg reclined between the points, feet kicked upward against the rippling of gilded metal, and waited. Waited for the next hail. Tell him where to go next.

It’d been a tiring game, but one they were forced to play. Genji himself was a dead man, and a glorified weapon. Jesse was a man on the run from an eight digit bounty sitting on his head. Neither of them could really afford to fall into the wrong hands. So it was a chase. A frustrating scavenger hunt of encrypted messages, and breadcrumb trails. But this is all they’d ever known for the entirety of their lives, wasn’t it? What they were bred to do?

It’d been too long. Yet it still felt like tearing open and digging into fresh wounds. Genji had never left him with any closure, had he? Though he had never meant for ‘goodbye’ to be permanent. No one had accounted for Zurich. Or maybe they had, it just happened more quickly, and more explosively than anticipated. And now they were all scattered like leaves to the wind. Never mind that Jesse had left before then. Nevermind he was the first person he tried to find. It had taken him this long to finally get a reply, to finally make contact.

He would have waited forever for it, holding onto the fraying thread of hope the gunslinger was still out there. It’s what brought him here, lounging strategically hidden in a relic of a nearly forgotten landmark, watching the fading sun paint the windows of skyscrapers with glitter, rose, and gold. The drone of passing cars and metro trains surrounded him. It could almost serve as some sort of distorted lullaby if he waited here much longer. He too, might even fall prey to the rust eating away at the monument.

A faint beeping began to sound rhythmically in his ear. The flicker of a notification danced along the corner of his vision behind the plate of his visor.

His cue.

[ 竜 ] –         The doctor, if he could even be considered one in the medical sense, was a hard one to come by. But that was in the nature of Genji’s work, to find things and people who did not wish to be found. 

Hypocritical of him, however it may be, as the cyborg was not too keen on being found, himself. In the months (or had it been a year now? Years? Time was relative.) since he’d left Overwatch, he’d spent every waking moment keeping off their grid, and moving to the erratic and aimless beat of his own drum. The wake of Zurich, and the inevitable disbandment of the organization left him even more lost than before, leaving what might have been a home broken and scattered to the wind.

There was no one to protect him now. His tracks had always been his own to cover, but there was no one left to check behind him in the event he missed a step along the way. 

And miss a step, he had. 

It came in the form of digging into some long  buried (or not so much) altruism, and an idealistic stretch. Genji never thought of himself as hero material, yet here he was, playing one in arid alleyways of a city in Syria, just outside of Damascus’ sprawl. What a fitting place it was, too, like him, trying to pick itself back up from years of being beaten down and dragged around, born out of bloodshed but trying to make a new and better name for itself, only to stumble a few times in the process.

Either way, it had landed the cyborg in a nasty set of trouble, and a busted right shoulder (and the better part of his right side for that matter) that was far out of his realm of repair and know-how of standard maintenance. But there was a name he’d heard murmured through walls and whispers of a medical researcher with a few cybernetics of his own. And though his origins were dubious, and whereabouts mostly a mystery as they kept changing, this Arcade Gannon was the best option he had.

And it was in the window of the man’s current residence, in the dark of a dry desert night, that the cyborg made his presence known. The arm itself had long stopped it’s sparking, though the exposed and fraying wires still had life in them. It hung limply by his charred and mangled side, looking every bit ominous as the ninja the wound belonged to in the city’s night time glow.

[ 竜 ] –         He’s pulled the tubes from his chest again.

It was a simple as that. Though something so simple had made breathing a chore. It rattled in his chest and through his lungs without making it up the lines of his throat, and every inhale was just as labored. Heaving in and out, though only the barest traces of oxygen managing to pass through.

Or maybe, those tubes had nothing to do with his breathing, and this was only a mere side effect of what caused him to tear them from his sternum in the first place. It was the feeling of his body separating, coming unglued from the machinery and circuitry to which it was bound, rejecting every inch of it.

And maybe they had nothing to do with the way his heart was struggling beneath a cage of metal and bone, though it was skipping beats between bouts of rapidly fired shots against its prison.

Either way, it hurts to breathe. Every exhale leaves the holes in his chest in a burst of carbon dioxide and steam. It never reaches his nose, or his mouth. The saliva compound tastes metallic.

But he’s stable. He wasn’t only moments before.

The heart that was skipping had nearly stopped entirely.

Now he sat here, in the cold sterility of the medical bay, and it’s white walls closing around him like they had so many times before. Monitors and the floating array of his vital signs projected color around him, but they offered him nothing but a false solace. 

He was waiting for her admonishment. It was coming. And he’d tune it out. Genji was already far to aware of what he’d done. There was a nagging part of him, gnawing on his brain stem, that wished it would have followed through. 

@comitatum​

[ 竜 ] –         The rain had stopped long ago, but the thickness of it hung in the air and clung to the tree branches and pine needles before seeping to the damp earth below. The clouds lingered, still coating the forest in their grey, and stretching their misty fingers low, low, low to drag the ground itself.

But it didn’t stop the birds from calling, ignoring the beat of water dripping from their perches. And each had their own song they thought should be heard, and over any other. And so, they waged their war of song, each note echoing through the fog and trees.

Peaceful. But a false peace.

Something lurked in this forest. ‘Evil’ might not have been the right word for it. But it was something that shouldn’t be there.

He could smell it; smell it over the fragrance that wafted up from the forest floor and it’s sweet decay and soil. He could smell it over the pungent odor of the fresh carcass splayed open before him, mangled an mauled beyond recognition aside from it’s very scent, something so very distinctly human. But what it was, he didn’t know.

And that fact, and it alone caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise.

It wasn’t fear that gripped him, no. It was an unnerving more akin to rage.

It wasn’t one of his kind. Reclusive creatures, and fiercely territorial by nature, there were few Oni who were bored enough to bother on some lesser territory than their own. Why waste the time on such a small little hell gate add more to their burden when their gates were already so grand enough? And there were even less who would impede on the land of a son of Sojirou, disgraced as he was. Especially not when the older brother had already chased off the lesser oni from the neighboring lot and claimed it as another of his own.

It wasn’t human. The only human scent he caught immediately, outside of the congregation of the village below, was the one at his feet. And it was most certainly dead.

No animal large enough stalked these woods. Even then, they tended to favor the livestock.

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

Slowly, the young demon stood. Crimson lined lips curled over the rise of ivory tusks in a silent snarl. The tips of his claws ached with the need to be used, and twitched under the pressure of the uncertainty of what to use them on. How frustrating it was.

But a frustration that was short lived. 

The far, yet distinct sound of the snapping of twig and brush under foot caught his attention and held it captive. Nostrils flared and eyes darted wildly as he drank in every tiny detail, every strange scent, every little leaf out of place.  He would find it He would find this... thing he couldn’t place, this thing that had the audacity to take what was his in his domain. 

He finds it, and he finds it quickly. But it’s not what he sought. Above the scent of rain soaked earth, the scent of blood, and whatever left it there was the scent of something foreign, yet familiar. As foreign as the gunpowder that clung to the boys trickling back home from their far off war. As familiar as the boys themselves. Yet teeming with some strange power that seemed to rival the traces of whatever this intruder had left behind.

A man, far off the main roads as if he’d lost his path somewhere along the way, clambering to find his way back. He catches sight of the back of his golden head, every strand shining like the sun that fought to claw it’s way through the clouds.

[ 竜 ] –         Nepal was not exactly the first destination on his list of aimless wandering. That was the definition of ‘aimless’ though, was it not? To be without aim. To have a destination in mind in the first place would have defeated the very purpose. Even then, Genji wasn’t sure what his purpose even was.

The moment he left the false sanctity of Geneva, his plan had been to run until he couldn’t anymore. Until he fell apart, or something else stopped him, whichever came first. He didn’t have a purpose anymore. He abandoned what he was built for the moment he crossed those borders. How easily they let him go had never set well with him. And maybe, just maybe, if he never stopped, they would never find him.

But now, here he was, walking, not running, through streets of red and brown brick and stacks upon stacks of brightly colored modernity weaved with an equally brilliant rainbow of flags and banners that celebrated nothing but life itself. And to top it off, at the side of an omnic, no less. A rather gentle, yet persistent omnic that had manged some how to work his way into the cyborg’s interest. Or maybe it was the fact that this sentient machine was the only glimpse of selfless promise he’d been given in... well... No. Genji couldn’t remember when someone had ever been so unyieldingly kind or patient, even when met with such hostility. And with no ulterior motive.

He humored the omnic. 

Finally, he followed him. Skeptic, distrusting, and still belligerent, yet he followed.

[ 竜 ] –           “I win.” The statement was posed rather nonchalantly, as if the glaring flash of ‘K.O.’ across the screen didn’t make it obvious enough. He of course had to verbalize his victory, unphased, as if he had expected it all along. Which of course, he had, same as he had the past several matches. His thumbs might not have been as quick as they used to be (but his motor skills were getting significantly better. Exponentially.), but there were just somethings one didn’t forget. As in, the right combination of buttons to press in succession.

And well, he had the move set of this particular title committed to memory in the sense it was nigh second nature.  Perhaps challenging Genji at a fighting game wasn’t exactly one of Jesse McCree’s more brilliant ideas, or even the best way to beat his chest and flaunt his ego. But hey. He was willing to give it a go. Especially since the Genji, himself, wasn’t one to turn away from a challenge. Furthermore, one he knew he would come out on top.

The grin plastered upon the cyborg’s face went unobstructed, freed from the confines of his mask and the rest of his helmet, which laid discarded elsewhere within the room along with the rest of his plating. It was lopsided, and nigh goading as his scarred upper lip curled to barely expose the line of his teeth, in contrast to the lower one that just didn’t seem to work quite right. A curious expression, accented only by the way his dark eyes seem to glow with a clear, mischievous gleam. But it was something Jesse knew how to read by now. It wasn’t the first, nor even the second time he’d bared perhaps what was one of his most vulnerable insecurities to the cowboy. 

The level of comfort was something... something.