ectothermal:

so… i don’t play overwatch?? buuut a couple long conversations with my good friend juliet and approximately eleven consecutive watches of the ‘dragons’ short later and… here we are with a little bit of shimadacest. i caught FEELINGS, y’all.

TW: incest, trauma trigger reaction, minor dissociation

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He thought he had it figured out. Peace, acceptance. Presence in the now, instead of belonging, chained, to the past. Genji worked hard for that progress, for that presence, for that peace. He fought for it. He earned it.

Just one moment, and it’s all undone. He’s all undone.

More pieces of him are synthetic than organic, anymore. He’s accepted this; he’s no less a man without the flesh and bone he’s lost. Still, there’s an ache that nags at the edges of his awareness – some of it is physical, the phantom pain of limbs long gone and the chafe and soreness where steel and silicone fuse with his skin, but some of it he can’t seem to place or placate. Tatami mats and river rocks feel different under his feet, now. The ramen bowls he loved as a child don’t taste the same. Sometimes even the roof of his own mouth throws him off – his tongue is calibrated for accuracy, not familiarity. Not nostalgia.

Hanzo is familiarity and nostalgia, wrapped up in a body that stumbles under the guilt that he refuses to put down. Hanzo belongs to the past, to Genji’s and to his own. He’s chained himself to it, and Genji fears he’ll drown in it.

Genji knows better. He knows to leave the past where it lies, but if he’s ever had a weak spot, it was always Hanzo. His brother’s thighs are thick and solid and warm under Genji’s good hand; his cock feels the same when it swells in his grip. Like this, he can almost forget time has passed. Like this, they’re just two brothers, in secret, all over again.

When Genji takes his brother into his mouth, hot and heavy and so, so familiar, he doesn’t taste how he remembers. Genji remembers the heady smell of Hanzo’s sweat on humid summer nights, how his scent would tint the taste of his skin to something wholly Hanzo, something he couldn’t describe if he were given years to put it into words. To his synthetic tongue, Hanzo tastes like – barely anything. A little salty from sweat.

It hits him like a brick to the chest. How much he’s lost. Not his body, not things that can and have been replaced. No, he’s lost so much more. The memory of taste, of touch. The way he interacts with the world.

The first sob bubbles up from deep in his gut before tears start to fall; it sounds wrong, too, electronic and truncated, lost somewhere in his vocal implant’s processing. Hanzo pulls his head back, hands on either side of his cheeks, gritting his teeth through the unnaturally hard grip Genji’s prosthetic hand has on his hip.

“Genji?” he asks, brows furrowed hard. “Why are you crying?” It takes Genji a long time to answer, breath hiccuping, tears running into the corners of his mouth. They taste wrong, too. Everything’s wrong, all of it, it’s not mine it’s not mine it’s not mine pounding a panicked rhythm inside his mind.

“I can’t taste you,” he says, finally, in a buzzing whisper. “It’s not right.”