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Hanzo let out a shuddering breath, steam forming instantly before his face in the sub-zero cold. The wind picked up and stung his cheeks. Reflexively, he shrunk into the arctic coat that Mei had lent him earlier and pulled the inner cowl up higher to try and cover his nose. He was suddenly very thankful that the climatologist had insisted upon him taking her spare outerwear even if he had proclaimed that he would function better without the extra weight.
--
“Hanzo, we are climbing a snowy mountain before dawn. It will be very cold and windy, you cannot wear just that ,” Mei said while gesturing incredulously to his typical archer’s attire, bare tattooed shoulder, chest, and all.
“Dr. Zhou, I assure you that I will be fine. I will be of better service to you as an escort if I maintain my normal attire for maximum mobility,” He retorted haughtily, but Mei did not skip a beat.
“Will you still be so serviceable when your left nipple’s fallen off from frostbite?” She pointed out with a smirk. Hanzo was immediately flustered.
“My--I, uh…” He did not think the shy and sweet scientist was capable of such directness, he had clearly underestimated her. He attempted to reorient himself, when Mei took the opportunity to shove a hefty white coat with grey geometric patterns and blue trimmings into his arms.
“Here, this coat even matches your arrows! And please, call me Mei.” She caught his eyes with her own and smiled warmly at him. Hanzo would be lying if he claimed that smile did not have any impact on him. He relented.
“Thank you...Mei,” He responded, voice barely above a whisper, testing her name against his tongue ever so cautiously. A simple name, yet one that echoed in his mind long after he had said it. At the time, the reason for why this was eluded him, and he was left defenseless in his mind’s bewilderment.
Oblivious to Hanzo’s distracted thoughts, Mei proceeded to hand him a pair of mountaineering goggles and a very fluffy, knit hat with dangling pom-poms. “Take these too.”
Hanzo looked down at the pile of stuff he was suddenly holding and arched a wary eyebrow at her. “No hat,” he dictated flatly.
Mei sighed, “It’s your ears, I guess.”
--
The very fluffy, knit hat with dangling pom-poms was now pulled snugly over Hanzo’s head and ears, knotted tightly underneath his chin, as he and Mei clambered over an icy mountain path. In retrospect, he acknowledged it was incredibly foolish of him to have challenged the climatologist’s assessment of their journey’s needs. After all, this was Mei’s field of expertise. And after all, Mei did survive nine years of cryostasis and abandonment in Antarctica when all her fellow colleagues did not.
Hanzo looked a couple of yards ahead of him to where Mei, encumbered by a large backpack filled with heavy research equipment, still deftly managed to climb over several steep boulders. She used her muscular legs to carefully vault herself past the rocks one after another, her robot companion hovering close and seemingly chirping encouragements to her whenever she cleared a difficult gap. He was surprised at how quickly the distance between Mei and himself seemed to widen in a short span of time. “Another underestimation,” he chided himself internally.
His pride was loathe to admit it, but as the ascent elevated and the air grew thinner, he found it difficult to regulate his breathing, and the biting winds of sheer malice certainly did not help. Hanzo Shimada, the Dragonstrike Archer formerly of the centuries-venerated-and-feared Shimada clan, was getting winded. Mei, on the other hand, was about to disappear from his sight entirely. Invigorated by a surge of competitiveness and a strong need to prove himself, he took a deep breath and launched himself swiftly over the craggy slope with his hands and toes. He set a brisk pace, pulling himself forward over rock after rock, determined to catch up to Mei, he was supposed to be her bodyguard on this mission after all.
But the morning was still dark, and so absorbed in his haste was he that Hanzo failed to notice the sleet-covered surface he landed on until it was too late. He slipped backwards harshly. Just as he shut his eyes and braced for impact, he felt a strong grip latch onto his forearm, and something round push up against his back. He opened his eyes to see Mei’s own, looking at him with worry as she held onto his arm.
“Omigosh, are you alright?” She asked him, panting. Mei had backtracked just in time to catch him from what would have been a nasty fall. Hanzo was beyond mortified at his own disgraceful display. Snowball shoved him back onto his own two feet from behind, then whirled around to peer at him through digital eyes, chirping admonishingly.
“Thank you, Dr. Zhou--I mean Mei,” He started sheepishly and corrected himself when he noticed Mei furrowed her brows at being called by her professional title. Snowball nudged him in the shoulder insistently. “And thank you as well, Snowball,” He added, venturing a hand to pet the robot’s dome, which seemed to greatly please the small synthetic, like a happy dog receiving scratches behind its ears.
“Are you alright?” Mei asked him again, concern still clearly written on her face. “We can take a break if--”
“I’m fine,” Hanzo replied tersely, and he kicked himself mentally for sounding so defensive. It was not Mei’s fault that he was, by his standards, failing miserably as a bodyguard. He had spent years traveling the world to perfect his skills, yet here he was, struggling to catch his breath after a few hours of mountain climbing with Mei. “I apologize for my...misstep earlier,” Hanzo insisted. “I won’t hold you back again. You wanted to reach the summit by sunrise correct? Let us not waste time then.”
Mei smiled her disarming smile at him again, and gave his arm a gentle squeeze. He had only then realized that she was still holding onto him, and that they were facing each other very closely. He suddenly felt a hot, unseemly blush blossom across his face, and he darted his gaze quickly to the ground.
“Hanzo, it’s okay. We have time,” Mei said comfortingly as she let go of him. The absence of her touch left his arm cold, even under the insulated coat. “And even if you’re fine, I could use a breather, I’m beat!”
Hanzo shot her a skeptical look. Liar , he thought. While her face shined with a thin layer of sweat and her cheeks were flushed from exertion, Mei’s breathing was even, and she looked like she had plenty of energy to spare. But she seemed to be enjoying herself a lot, and that thought made Hanzo feel better about being coddled, her cheerful expression dissolving his own self-directed scorn.
“C’mon, there’s a good spot a little bit ahead where we can sit down and rest,” Mei gestured for Hanzo to follow before hiking ahead of him. Snowball whirled into motion and bumped into Hanzo twice, beeping at him to hurry up, before floating past him to hover by Mei’s side. They made their way to a clearing overlooking a snowy valley. The first stirrings of daybreak dappled the sky like a freckled blush, the clouds reflecting a soft lavender veil over the fading indigo of night. Mei set down her heavy equipment and dusted off a flat rock for the both of them to sit on. Hanzo hesitantly unstrapped his gear as well and placed his quiver and storm bow next to Mei’s things before taking a seat beside her. As they settled down, Mei pulled out a thermos and unscrewed the cap. She poured them two cups of hot tea. Its steam flowed out of the container and fogged up her glasses, which Hanzo found secretly endearing. “Here you go, Mei’s special spiced oolong blend!”
Hanzo accepted his cup with a small “Thanks.” The fragrance wafted up towards his face, and he had to admit, it smelled heavenly. As he took a careful sip of the hot beverage, a cascade of warmth seemed to travel through his veins and re-energize his core. It was exactly what he needed. He briefly wondered if Mei was not in fact a scientist, but a sorcerer instead. He let out a contented sigh, “This is amazing.”
Mei burst into laughter. Hanzo belatedly realized the pun he had accidentally let slip, and groaned. “Hey that’s my line!” Mei giggled. “But I’m glad you enjoy it. Warms you right up, right?”
Hanzo nodded, and took another sip.
“What’s your secret?” He asked, honestly curious and relaxed enough to not shun a little conversation.
“The blood of my enemies,” Mei responded innocently. Hanzo choked on his drink.
Mei dissolved into giggles once more. “Just kidding, just kidding. It’s a sprinkle of nutmeg and some sliced fresh ginger.”
Hanzo cleared his throat and collected himself. Normally, he would have considered how easily Mei baited him to be an annoyance, but the more he was able to hear her laugh, a sound that reminded him of windchimes back in Hanamura, the more he found that he didn’t mind the bruises to his dignity as much as he would have before. However, he did think that he needed to start giving a little bite back to all her jabs.
He chuckled lowly, “Well if you were not kidding, then this is certainly the most appetizing blood tea I’ve ever tasted.” He raised his cup in one hand towards her. “May your enemies’ blood continue to flow, kanpai!”
Mei laughed and clinked her own cup against his. “Ganbei!” They drank slowly, and let the hot beverage fill them with renewed warmth. But when Hanzo glanced over at Mei again, he noticed that her smile had waned, replaced by a faraway expression.
“I used to make this all the time for my co-workers when we were stationed at Eco-Point Antarctica,” Mei spoke softly without looking at Hanzo, her eyes cast over the mountainscape before them, as if seeking out something over the snow capped horizon. “It was the first thing on my mind when I woke up, I didn’t even think…” Mei trailed off and shook her head. A moment later, and her smile was back, just as bright as it was before.
“Nevermind. I’m going to run some diagnostics, and look at how far we have left to go. Take your time and finish your tea,” Without waiting for Hanzo’s response, she turned from him and walked over to where she had left her equipment. Hanzo observed her giving Snowball instructions as she pulled up a holographic display. He sighed into his cup, scattering the steam. He never doubted that her good cheer and persistent optimism were anything short of genuine, but he also knew that her smiles concealed profound sorrow. It was a sorrow he was all too familiar with: the feeling of utter emptiness in place of a fallen loved one, the whole world as you knew it flipped upside down seemingly overnight, and the unshakeable sense of guilt over having lived through it all.
When he thought he had killed his brother with his own hands at the behest of his clan, he had let his sorrow consume him. For ten years he had wandered the globe to seek redemption, but found not a sliver of it to sooth his internal rage. For nearly the same amount of time, Mei had been asleep and forgotten by the world. Yet despite all the time and people she has lost, it seemed to Hanzo that from the moment she awoke, she was already leagues ahead of him, undeterred and unwaveringly devoted to fight the good fight. She possessed a sense of purpose that a decade of training and drifting had not allowed him to grasp. Perhaps he was destined to never catch up to her. Thinking upon Mei’s quiet strength that prevailed through her sweet smiles and silly puns, reminded Hanzo of the day he met her.
--
Hanzo had never intended to assist Overwatch. After Genji had revealed his survival to Hanzo, he was filled with a storm of chaotic feelings. He felt astonishing relief, utter disbelief, anger, confusion, and remorse all at once. If during his ten years of travel, Hanzo had been a rudderless ship upon water, then Genji’s sudden reappearance in his life had turned him into a leaf lost in a typhoon. Overwatch had saved the brother he thought he had killed, yet remade him into something he did not recognize. The spoiled carefree princeling had become a disciplined lethal weapon, and yet that is still not who Genji is anymore. Hanzo might have accepted it if his brother had come back from the grave to exact his rightful vengeance against him, but what he could not bear was Genji’s forgiveness. So he had stayed far away from Overwatch after Genji’s “invitation.”
However, word had traveled through the grapevine between mercenary groups and other unsavory characters in the information underworld, that a cyborg ninja operating on behalf of an illicit new Overwatch was dismantling criminal activities one after another. Hanzo had cursed Genji’s sloppiness and was about to dismiss the whisperings as his brother’s “own damn fault” when he caught wind of a second rumor: that a black-market arms dealer had acquired a special means to “take care” of the cyborg once and for all.
After knocking in a few heads and threatening a couple of grunts with some intimidating arrow work, Hanzo had wrung out the information he needed, and feared. The arms dealer had attained piercing rounds loaded with viral nanobots designed to decay synthetic augmentation and in Genji’s case, kill him. The syndicate had already mobilized and caught Overwatch’s attention. Genji was being lured into a trap.
Hanzo tracked down the site of the ambush, and worked swiftly in the shadows to disarm the gang members awaiting the Overwatch team’s arrival. One after another, he sowed chaos in their midst with expertly aimed shots and scatter arrows. But their numbers were many, and before he could incapacitate them all, Overwatch had landed and sheer chaos erupted. Someone had set off an explosion that dislodged Hanzo from his perch, and while the ringing resounded in his ears one mobster grabbed him in a headlock from behind. He caught a glimpse of dashing neon green in his periphery as he grappled with his assailant. Then up high in some rafters, he saw a sniper trained to the spot right where his brother was fighting. Hanzo vaulted his head backwards, breaking his enemy’s nose, and sent the man crashing to the ground with a sweeping kick. He notched a desperate arrow aimed at the sniper focusing on an unsuspecting Genji. As he let his arrow loose, the loud crack of a rifle’s shot pierced the air, and Hanzo felt his blood run cold.
But as his senses returned to him, Hanzo saw that the sniper was dead, his arrow lodged into their heart, and Genji was alive and protected behind...a wall of ice? Before Hanzo could make sense of the unusual phenomenon, he heard a voice cry out,”Dongzhu! Buxu zou!” Next to Genji, a woman launched a diminutive robot into the remaining crowd of enemies, generating a blizzard that froze them all to their spots.
Reflex driven by the fear of losing his brother a second time took over, and Hanzo claimed the opportunity to finish off the rest of their enemies. “Ryuu ga waga teki wo kurau!” He summoned his spirit dragons, fired them straight into the crowd of frozen henchmen, and revealed himself to the Overwatch strikeforce.
He was roped into riding back to base with the team afterwards, but the trip was dampened by tense silence between the two brothers. It was not until the drop ship landed in the watchpoint hangar bay that a torrent of emotions suddenly burst forth from both of them. Genji asked Hanzo why he was there, and Hanzo let loose a volley of heated admonishments about how Genji’s carelessness had nearly gotten him killed again, that being a part of Overwatch would only lead him to death or worse. That in turn set Genji off. Things escalated, they shouted feelings they had kept bottled up for years at each other, and eventually weapons were drawn. But before they could do any damage, Hanzo’s and Genji’s hands were frozen by several short blasts of ice. Hanzo looked to his side and saw the woman who had protected Genji in the firefight before, leveling her unusual weapon at them with a troubled expression.
She met Hanzo’s gaze, quivering with emotion. “Stop this. Your brother is alive . You have each other, you both do! Isn’t that enough to live for?” Her raw assertion stunned and bewildered him. She lowered her blaster and released them from their ice shackles. “What I wouldn’t give for my family to come back to me...”, she said cryptically as she dropped her head and cried. The blonde medic and the gorilla scientist who had been standing back silently this entire time came up to the sobbing woman to offer some comfort.
“Mei...come on let’s go. You need rest. Winston, can you take her things?” The doctor put a hand on Mei’s shoulder and gently guided her towards the exit with Winston in tow.
“Angela…” Genji called out to the doctor.
“Go heal yourself, Genji,” Angela replied brusquely without glancing back at him. Genji seemed to visibly deflate as the rest of the team left the two brothers behind, alone. An awkward silence resumed between them, but this time it was absent of any aggression.
Hanzo broke the silence first. “Who was that woman?” Hanzo asked, Mei’s words still churning in his mind. Isn’t that enough to live for? A question that he had no answer to because the truth was that in his years adrift he had only thought he deserved death. Now he was forced to confront not only Genji’s peace, but this strange woman’s absurd appeal for him to “live.”
“I assume you’re referring to Dr. Mei-Ling Zhou,” Genji rubbed his forearms where Mei had momentarily frozen them in place before, Hanzo wondered if the action was merely a result of psychological impulse or if Genji could still feel receiving an ice burn. “You remember the scientist who awoke from cryostasis in Antarctica after nine years, and made her way back to civilization alone? It was all over the news.”
Hanzo nodded. He vaguely recalled several broadcasts about some Chinese environmentalist who rescued a family of polar bears with a strange new technology, and how she was the sole survivor of an expedition team, written off as lost in a storm, while Overwatch was in the midst of its own public falling out nearly a decade ago.
“She’s my friend,” Genji added honestly. “They’re all my friends. Overwatch is…” Genji paused, turning the words over in his own mind before coming to a resolute decision to tell Hanzo the truth. “Overwatch is my home now, my family, as dysfunctional as it is.”
Hanzo had thought that the finality of Genji’s words would have hurt a lot more than it actually did. He realized that he had already long known that returning to their previous lives was an impossible dream. Water cannot be unspilled, and neither can blood. He could only accept the reality that is; pain, scars and all. “Family always is,” Hanzo affirmed, and all of a sudden Genji seemed alleviated of an invisible burden he had not known that he had been carrying for years.
That night, the two brothers sat together on a platform at the edge of the watchpoint and finally just talked . For hours, they told each other about their experiences and feelings throughout the past ten years. The journeys they had traveled, the lessons they had learned, the questions they had sought answers to, and those which they still continue to seek. Hanzo listened as Genji recounted his tumultuous years as a part of Blackwatch, the horrible conflict he felt about his own cyborg identity, and at last how he found inner peace under the guidance of Zenyatta, an Omnic monk.
He listened as Genji told him about the various members of the hodge-podge vigilante Overwatch: Angela Ziegler, the renowned nano-biologist who had saved Genji’s life; Winston, a gorilla scientist from the moon whose hope for humanity made him a natural leader; Reinhardt Wilhelm, a peerless warrior who had seen more battles in one lifetime than most; Fareeha Amari, daughter of the legendary Ana Amari and therefore burdened with such a legacy (a feeling both brothers understood too well); Lena Oxton, Genji’s favorite sparring opponent, a pilot adventurer that could jump through time (this utterly perplexed Hanzo, but he tried not to let it show on his face); and Jesse McCree, Genji’s former partner from his Blackwatch days, an outlaw mercenary that Genji described to Hanzo as “someone whom I think you’ll hate, but also might become your best friend.” To which Hanzo responded with a big scoff.
As Genji spoke about his “family”, Hanzo’s thoughts returned to Mei once more. What I wouldn’t give to have my family come back to me. “The climatologist, Mei-Ling Zhou was it? What did she mean by her ‘family’ coming back to her? Was she talking about you?” Hanzo asked.
Genji shook his head. “She was very close to her research colleagues in Antarctica, but well…” Genji trailed off, and the harsh tones of the words sole survivor sounded again in Hanzo’s mind.
“Any blood relatives?” Hanzo ventured, but Genji shook his head once more.
“Not that I’m aware of. Nine years was a long time to lose,” he said. “Imagine going to sleep one night, and waking up to find that you’ve--”
“Lost everyone,” Hanzo finished. Genji nodded silently.
It was then that Hanzo finally understood the reason behind Mei’s tears. He had thought that he had lost Genji, but against all odds, fate had brought him back into Hanzo’s life. In spite of such a miracle, Hanzo clung to his stubborn self-loathing. It must have felt like the biggest slap in the face to someone who knew with absolute certainty that she would never see her loved ones again. So much for honor and redemption , Hanzo had thought, ashamed and humbled.
--
Since that night, Hanzo maintained that in regards to joining Overwatch, he was “still thinking it over”, but he stuck around the watchpoint under the pretense of making sure Genji didn’t get sloppy again. At first he tried shadowing him on his missions, but this had ended rather quickly as Genji vehemently rejected having a “babysitter” distract him during deployment. Still, he stayed with his brother on base anyways, and bit by bit he gradually found himself assimilating into their patchwork semblance of a team despite his best efforts to resist.
As time passed between missions, Hanzo had begun to quietly observe his strange new companions’ mannerisms. Lena had the spectacular ability to bring out the mischievous devil in Genji, a side to him that Hanzo had previously thought was forfeited to his past. Somehow they always managed to placate Winston after breaking a bunch of things from another prank gone wrong (his lab always smelled suspiciously of peanut butter afterwards). McCree was exactly the irritant that Genji had warned him about, yet his brother had also been correct in that despite their polar opposite tastes and attitudes toward just about everything, from fashion sense to common sense, they had become fast drinking companions and confidantes to each other. Reinhardt was every bit the type of old warrior that Hanzo expected, one who magnetized reverence around him. That is until he chugs several dozen steins of beer and someone (usually McCree) deliberately asks him about David Hasselhoff. Before anyone knows it, all of the supposedly clandestine Overwatch has taken over a karaoke bar, listening to the veteran belt out “Looking for Freedom.”
Behind the raucous cheer and bad singing however, Hanzo often caught glimpses of unspoken heartache and mending wounds in all of them; from the way Pharah would pause at the threshold of her mother’s old office before a mission, to the way McCree’s hand would sometimes linger on Genji’s shoulder just a little bit too long. Laughter was both the pill and bandage to soothe the deepest of their scars, and to Hanzo there was none whose laughter knelled as sublimely as that which belonged to one Mei-Ling Zhou.
In stark contrast to the night of their first meeting, Mei’s usual temperament was full of positive energy, a steadfast dedication to her beliefs, but also humility and empathy. Of all the little things he picked up on with the various Overwatch agents, Hanzo noticed her quirks the most. She fidgeted with her bangs and glasses whenever she felt embarrassed; She loved to make bad puns (McCree, Reinhardt, and Tracer were her biggest and loudest fans); She doodled compulsively while deep in thought, so her research notes’ margins were always covered in charming drawings; And she scrunched her nose up in such a way whenever she was about to sneeze that even Hanzo had to admit that it was the cutest thing in the world.
One day, Mei had discovered a faint signal coming from an old data beacon on a remote peak in Northeast Greenland, a relic of the days of Eco-points’ past network, and she immediately made plans to set out to recover whatever data she could from it. Hanzo, Genji, and McCree had been passing by the hangar bay en route to the training range when they overheard Winston voicing his concerns to her about making the journey solo.
“I won’t be alone, Winston. I’ll have Snowball with me!” Mei tried to convince her worried friend. Snowball added in some positive beeping to help persuade the hairier of the two scientists, but he was hardly reassured.
“I’m sorry, Mei, but Snowball doesn’t even have thumbs,” Winston countered. Snowball narrowed their digital eyes at him and warbled indignantly. “I could go with you, the ascent would be easier with someone watching your back.”
“Overwatch needs you, Winston. You still have several active missions to resolve, and far more dangerous ones than my mountain hike!” Mei reasoned. Just as Winston was about to ask her to wait until after the missions were complete, Mei interjected, reading his mind. “I don’t know how long the beacon will last. I can’t risk losing that data if I wait too much longer,” she said firmly.
Winston sighed in defeat. He knew how much acquiring that data meant to Mei, and he knew that when her mind was set to a task, there was no stopping her. Still, he wanted some assurance that his friend would be safe. “If only someone, anyone , could accompany you I’d--”
“I’ll go with her,” Hanzo volunteered, surprising both scientists. He stepped into the hangar, missing the suspicious glance Genji and McCree exchanged with each other as Hanzo summarily ignored them to approach Mei. “I have no scheduled engagements and I’ll be ready whenever you are to depart,” he paused, then added a tad hastily, “That is...if you’ll have me.”
Mei blushed and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear before adjusting her glasses. He realized he had embarrassed her. Why did he say it like that? He fought down his own disconcerted blush and dared not look back to see if Genji and McCree were still watching them.
“Um...of course! I mean…” Mei spoke, flustered. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and then smiled that smile at him, calmly acquiescing, “Thank you, Hanzo.” He wondered if he would still be able to accompany her after having his heart completely and utterly liquified.
--
But now here he was. Bundled up from head to waist in her puffy spare outdoor clothes, sipping her homemade spiced tea blend, and practically staring at her with starry-eyed wonder.
“Hanzo?” Mei’s voice snapped him out of his long reverie.
“Hmm?”
“Are you ready to continue?” Mei asked as she repacked her equipment, looking back at Hanzo with no trace of her earlier melancholy.
“Ready whenever you are,” he responded as he handed her his empty thermos cup. Their hands brushed against each other’s briefly, but he did not let it linger. He recoiled inwardly. Despite the time he has spent in the midst of Overwatch, reconciling with his brother and slowly growing more open to the team around him, Hanzo did not dare to let himself get carried away. The present could not erase all the sins of his past, and a killer had no right to demand anything but to shoulder the consequences of his actions.
If Mei had noticed his flinching, she did not comment on it. She simply looked at him for a brief moment with ponderous brown eyes, before shouldering her pack and responding encouragingly, “Alright then let’s go! We’re not far from the top now!” The excited lilt in her voice made Hanzo’s pulse tingle. He knew he was unworthy of her. He was content to merely stand near her warmth, or so he kept telling himself.
The rest of the climb to the summit was relatively straightforward, but the higher altitude and untouched wilderness forced them to traverse more carefully. Mei kept close to Hanzo, the precarious terrain often required them to help each other pass. It would have indeed been difficult for one person, as skilled at scaling mountains as she was, to make it through the last stretch of this climb.
Just as they were within reach of their destination, they noticed that a fissure from a rockslide had cut off their path, but Mei was unfazed. “Hold on I have an idea,“ she said as she pulled out her endothermic blaster to form an icy bridge over the gap. “It’s very slippery though,” Mei gulped, looking down at how far the fall would be if they were to slip. It was not reassuring.
“Leave it to me,” Hanzo said as he tied one end of a rope to a boulder and attached the other to an arrow. He shot it to the other side of the crevasse to create a railing. He extended an arm out to her, “Stay close, be careful.” He didn’t consider the ramifications of her stepping into his outstretched limb until her body was suddenly flush against his. He closed his arm over her shoulder hastily as his other hand gripped for dear life on the flimsy rope railing he had made, every ounce of his self-control warring against all the electrified neurons in his system. He only remembered to breathe once they had finally made their shaky way across and Mei let go of his side.
“Haha! That was dangerous!” Mei exclaimed, laughing and trembling with adrenaline. Hanzo couldn’t help but laugh himself, even though he was vibrating from a slightly different source of anxiety. “The beacon should be just up ahead! C’mon let’s go!” Driven by sheer excitement, Mei grabbed Hanzo’s hand and vaulted forward, allowing him no time to protest, not that he could say anything with his heart stuck in his throat anyways.
They approached a beaten and corroded weather sensor at the summit landing, the signal beeping weakly like the labored breathing of a dying animal. Mei rushed over and got to work right away. She extracted her laptop and connected it to the beacon’s terminal. Snowball whirled around her curiously as she typed a furious sequence of code.
“C’mon, c’mon...yes! It’s syncing! It worked! We did it!” She cheered and turned to Hanzo. She shocked him with a giant bear hug, even lifting him off the ground ever so slightly. Snowball twirled in circles around them trilling joyfully. And that was it, Hanzo was certain he just died in her arms right then and there, his soul evaporated into a million particles in the atmosphere.
It was then that dawn finally broke over the mountains. Consciousness returned to him as he looked up to behold a cascade of rich vermillion stretch beyond the crest, and illuminate the whole range of snow capped peaks. Light reflected off the crystalline snow in a frenzied yet elegant dance as the mountains seemed to spark with life upon being touched by the sun.
“Wow...it’s beautiful,” Mei said breathlessly. She still held onto Hanzo gently, but her gaze was drawn over the morning landscape, filled with marvel.
“Indeed,” Hanzo replied, his own eyes no longer looked out at the view, but upon Mei instead. She was to him, a light that outshined the most radiant of sunrises, an intoxicating presence that truly emanated the meaning of her name: beautiful spirit. And he could not bear the thought of diminishing her bright spirit with his own wretched shadows.
He sighed wistfully, and attempted to extricate himself from her embrace, but Mei stopped him.
“Quit it,” she ordered.
“What?” Hanzo asked, perplexed.
“I recognize that sigh of yours. Your whole ‘such beauty is wasted upon the soul of a killer’ thing or whatever,” she explained, imitating Hanzo’s voice facetiously. He quirked an incredulous eyebrow at her exaggerated tone, but did not protest.
“Look over there, Hanzo,” Mei said, pointing out into the valley. Hanzo scanned the view following Mei’s direction and spotted a large bird of prey gliding between the bluffs. “That’s a white-tailed eagle, I’m certain of it,” Mei explained. “They were thought to have gone extinct ten years ago. I remember reading a report about it before setting out to Antarctica, and yet here they are. Against all odds, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, they survived.”
Mei turned to face him. He was startled to see tears brimming in her eyes. However they were not tears of anguish, but of something ineffable, something determined to seize the most impossible of dreams. “They have a future just as we do, and it’s a future that’s worth fighting for,” She said with a dauntless smile. “Even if you think you don’t deserve it, I do.” Her tears rolled freely down her cheeks. and caught the scattered gold of the dawn around them.
Hanzo suddenly felt an intense chaos of knots unravel within his heart. The floodgates to all the emotions he had kept forbidden for years unlocked, and he let himself surrender completely to the rush that followed. He leaned in to Mei and kissed her.
Mei responded by strengthening her grip around his waist, and Hanzo deepened the kiss like a man starved. He felt as if he were set ablaze by the heavens, the cold of their surroundings entirely forgotten, his only recourse to drink zealously from the essence of stars that was Mei’s light, her heart, her everything.
When they finally broke for air, they were both flushed and dazed, mentally seeking a foothold into reality once more. Snowball chirruped gladly at them and Mei laughed, the trance subsided but Hanzo’s feelings did not. “Mei-Ling Zhou, you are...a revelation,” he cupped her face with one hand, stroking away the tracks of her tears with his thumb. Mei smiled and leaned into his touch.
“And you, Hanzo Shimada…” Mei giggled and swatted playfully at the pom-poms dangling from Hanzo’s hat. “Are super cute!” Hanzo swiftly yanked the hat off his head and shoved it into his coat pocket. He silenced Mei’s outburst of laughter with another kiss, one that she returned wholeheartedly.
For the first time in a very long time, Hanzo felt like a man renewed. Just as Mei had said, they had a future ahead of them, and it was a future that he was finally eager to fight for, to live for; a future with her in it. Hanzo was once an impassable mountain, a monolith entrenched in a valley of lament, but now the dawn had arrived.
[End]