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Jesse is awake early, the sun only just easing up over the horizon. Everything is hushed in a way it won’t be again until nightfall; the kind of quiet that requires reverence, or abandonment.
Churches, and graveyards, and the stillness of morning.
He’s comfortable and content, caught up in his blankets, but once he’s lost the thread of drowsiness he can never catch it again. Jesse presses his face into tangled green hair, and breathes for a while. Warm skin under his fingers, the faint scent of shampoo.
Then he leaves Genji sleeping, just like he always does.
He’s halfway through making breakfast, whistling the melody of a song he can’t quite remember the words to, when he feels Genji’s eyes on him from down the hall. Their bedroom door is open. Genji’s laid out sideways on Jesse’s pillows, hair in his eyes, uncharacteristically alert.
Watching Jesse with blatant interest, but there’s also something confused there, something calculating. Like he’s trying to figure Jesse out.
Like he’s trying to remember him, but it’s just out of his grasp.
It’s an expression Jesse knows by heart, now. Genji is here with him, but he’s also somewhere else.
Someone else.
Another place, another time.
Genji’s cybernetics are astounding but delicate things— finicky, and sensitive, and Jesse isn’t sure where they’ve left him today. He turns off the stove and walks down the hallway, leaning against the frame of his bedroom door and dragging his eyes over Genji, head inclined with a soft smile.
“Morning, gorgeous. How you feeling?”
Genji smiles, amused, and stretches in place.
“Hello, handsome,” Genji purrs back, accent far thicker than usual.
Like he’s only just started to learn English.
Jesse tenses, and tries to keep the anxiety out of his voice.
“You doing alright, baby? Need me to get you anything?”
It’s clear the only word Genji really parses from all that is baby, and he smiles wider and arches in their sheets.
“I must have been drunker than I realized, because I don’t remember your name,” Genji murmurs in Japanese, looking at Jesse through sultry eyes. “Or anything else about you, which,” Genji looks Jesse up and down, gaze lingering on his boxers as he bites his bottom lip, “is a shame, you are so tall, fuck. I need to get back but I can make an exception for you.”
Genji’s always the prettiest thing Jesse has ever seen, but there’s something unsettling about him like this; looking at Jesse as though he is nothing more than a stranger. Some nameless conquest he wants between his thighs, quick and dirty, before he leaves to go back home. Back to Shimada castle, which is in ruins a whole world away.
Back to Sojiro, who is buried in the ground.
Genji trails his hand down his abdomen, and slips it between his thighs— his left not his right, muscle memory keeping him safe. He picks up in English, words stilted and awkward.
It would be endearing if it wasn’t terrifying, Genji sliding closer to anguish unawares.
“Want to fuck me again, handsome? Give me something to remember you by?”
Jesse is moving towards the bed when Genji throws the sheets off himself and tries to sit up.
Tries to lift himself upright on a palm he doesn’t have. Balance himself using legs that are on the floor, lifeless and disconnected.
Genji ends up sprawled out on the mattress, staring at the place where his right arm ends with wide eyes. His breathing picks up, fast and panicky.
Then he looks down at his legs, left hand trembling as he reaches out and lays a palm over the end of his thigh. Scarred, uneven skin. The smooth metal of the port.
Jesse knows all this by heart, too— has mapped it out with his lips, with his tongue, painting every inch of Genji in wet, worshipful kisses.
In this moment, it doesn’t help either of them.
Genji’s eyes go impossibly wider, pupils shrunk down to pinpoints. His jaw shivers. His chest heaves. He opens his mouth and makes a choking noise, eyes roving around now— Jesse can see the green glow in his irises that mean Genji’s diagnostics have come online. Knows they’re telling him all about his elevated heart rate and the increase in blood pressure and the absence of his prosthetics.
Telling him all the ways he’s falling apart inside in rows of numbers and text and soundless alarms. Clinical and unfeeling.
Utterly foreign.
“Ha—” Genji chokes again, drawing himself up, weaving unsteadily, “Hanzo,” he sobs out, looking at Jesse with raw terror in his eyes.
Then his voice is a stream of unadulterated fear, Japanese coming so fast Jesse can hardly keep up.
“Where- where’s Hanzo, where… where am I, where… what happened to me please, I— I need to talk to Hanzo, I need— I— fuck .”
Logically Genji should be afraid of Jesse— as far as he knows he went to sleep whole, and woke up in pieces— but there’s enough of him present to lean into Jesse when he sits on the bed. To fist his left hand in Jesse’s shirt.
To hide his face in Jesse’s chest. To relax some when Jesse threads his fingers into his hair.
“Shhhh, easy, baby, easy.” Jesse’s Japanese will never be perfect, but it’s good enough to get him by right now. This is why he learned it in the first place.
To talk Genji back from the places he gets lost. To soothe him, when everything is sharp and strange and unmerciful.
“I’ll call Hanzo for you in just a second,” Jesse says, accent heavy on his tongue. “He’s close, he can come get you if you want, I promise. Breathe for me, first, okay? Can you do that?”
One of Genji’s lungs is artificial. Jesse remembers him having a hard time adjusting to it at first— feeling breathless, like he was suffocating. Remembers working him through panic attacks, with me, darlin’, nice and slow, and they breathed together, Jesse holding Genji while he quaked.
Genji’s breathless, now, and Jesse lays a palm on his shoulder blades, and inhales slow and deep.
Following Jesse’s lead comes to Genji like breathing should— easy, easy. He tucks his face against him, in and out, until there’s no more wheeze in the whir of his lungs.
No more steam fogging out of his mouth, systems overheating as he forgets himself.
His jaw is still quivering, muscles alight with tension.
“I got you, Genji. Alright? I got you.”
Genji nods, and hides his face.
Whoever Jesse is to Genji right now, it’s more than a stranger.
For the moment, it’s enough.
-
Genji usually comes back to him before he has to call Hanzo, and Jesse considers himself lucky. It’s rare enough for Genji to get stuck in his memories in this particular place, and rarer still for him to linger. Today isn’t one of those days.
Today, nobody is lucky.
Jesse watches them lean into each other on his bed, Genji still clutching the end of his bicep, shell-shocked and forlorn. The prosthetics would probably help, but Genji seems almost afraid of them.
Like putting them on will make it all real.
Hanzo’s arm is around him, face blank and made of stone. To anyone else he would look emotionless.
To Jesse, he looks like he’s a breath away from falling apart.
Hanzo clenches his jaw; turns his head. Tucks his face into Genji’s hair.
“Father will be furious. We have to get back,” Genji insists. Vacant. Far away. Hanzo shakes his head, and rubs his hand up and down Genji’s arm.
“You don’t need to worry about him right now,” Hanzo says, every word deliberate. “He’s gone.”
It isn’t a lie, but it feels like one— Sojiro is gone, but he’s left behind scars, and Jesse can’t help but worry.
Hanzo meets his eyes, looking at Jesse like he has the answers, when both of them know better. There are no more answers.
There are just more memories, and the turns they take holding Genji close until he comes back to them.