Title: Psyche & 雀
Author: Ri-Ryn
Chapter 2: Mocking Birds Drink Wine
Word Count: 1484
Genre: Supernatural/Angst/Horror
Rating: M* (Content suitable for Mature Teens)
Disclaimer: Overwatch belongs to Blizzard Entertainment.
Warnings: Blood/Gore. Severe Language. Depression. Mental Instability and Mental Health Issues. Literal physical manifestation of Mental Illness. A step past split personality/dissociation.
A/N: I sometimes feel like this story could be so much better and that it's moving too quickly. But I'm busy, short on time, and cannot figure out how to make it longer without dragging this out.
A/N #2: No one might care, but! Chapter 1, the gray shrike is a songbird. Shrikes imitate the sounds of various songbirds to lure in and hunt them. Ch. 2, a type of mocking bird (Mimus macdonaldi) will drink blood from other birds and are highly aggressive.
A week at Watchpoint had Genji stiffly entering Angela's reopened medical bay, a place he circumvented fastidiously yet Hanzo had put him in here twice.
Angela pursed her lips but simply leaned back, beckoning Genji to speak first. The churning in her abdomen felt that Genji's uneasiness would be associated with the unwelcome guest skulking around Gibraltar these nights.
Genji would have an easier impossibility attempting to vomit with his damaged esophagus and stomach- lab grown and replaced. "Hanzo is talking more that he did twenty-eight years prior to assuming he killed me. And to absolutely nothing."
Angela had noticed, but medical ethics, her oath, be damned. She had overturned them repeatedly saving and modifying Genji, incidents with Overwatch and Blackwatch employing her...and personal mercies on battlefields and in distressed countries. She would not go out of her way to help or save him. Stitch him back together perhaps, but she cared nothing for the stuffing spilling out of his head if it did not kill him or put the Watchpoint staff at risk.
"I do not know if this is his way of coping or if what sanity he had prior is now damaged beyond aid. Hanzo has done this ten years now, conversed with a me that does not exist, that never has." Genji fiddled with the slits of his hand, knowing shuriken would not come out but desiring it for unknown reasons.
Angela was beyond moved, apathetic suited her tastes. "I believe the only honest thing he has is this coping version of you. And to be frank," her eyes narrowed, "he came away ten years ago with two unwarranted blessings. Living and his hallucination."
Steam exited from the lines of his galvanized playing. "Dr. Ziegler, please." Toes were trampled if he wasn't addressing her by given name. Flawless missions aside, he brought Hanzo here to reconnect and heal- a fool's errand if the other was perpetually injured mentally or otherwise. "I want my brother back and all the good and bad associated with my wishes, whatever they may be."
Guilt towards Genji had sluggishly consumed her initial ire leaving cold resignation. "I will contact Mr. Shimada for this health screening and file creation early, then." The doctor tapped at her abandoned hollow pad, sending a notification through Athena to the sniper.
Mental deterioration aside, Angela had her work made by one sub-human man. There was an eternal plethora of injured history to his body: surgeries, purposeful breaks and treatment, battered tissue, scars originating from guns and blade to unclassified traumas the man spoke nothing of. The completed blood panel and toxicology screen alerted her, prompting her to open the notification. Hanzo was altogether uninterested as he listened with rapt attention to the ceiling.
"Agent Shimada, are you aware that you are anemic?" Nothing indicated from his patient history a predisposed disposition. Having thrown privacy out, his diet or lack of self-harm revealed nothing to her of the finding.
"I am aware. It is not chronic." The sparrow tugged at his ponytail while Angela's eyes were focused on her screen's report.
"I love your hair Anija. It would be great if you grew it longer again". He rose to rest against the ceiling once more. The less time his brother made contact with this type of filth, the better.
"No, Susume. [It is far too easy for the assassins they send. Even if we reside here now.]"
Susume? The blonde tapped her desk, drawing Hanzo's eyes and agitating the Sparrow's temper. "Are you aware of the cause, Agent Shimada?"
Hanzo reached for the 'air', wiping Genji's mouth of the red stain and dripping, receiving an impish grin in return. "Susume becomes hungry though he has no need to eat, it occasionally rises as a desire." He swatted another hand away from his hair ribbon, his little brother pouting. The twisted, puckered holes of his back ached. "I will not and am unable to tell Genji no."
Angela raised an eyebrow. "Genji. Genji does this to you?" She put the pad away on record, seating herself across from Hanzo. The potential for disaster during their burgeoning operations was elevated if he was as compromised as Angela suspected. They had simply been lucky so far.
She bit her lip, hand folded into her blue scrubs and white lab coat. "Mr. Shimada, when you see Genji, what does he look like, what does he say, when do you see him?"
Intelligent, analytical, disappointed, blue phased through the archer's eyes before returning to their normal, stormy gray.
Hanzo's jaw clenched before he threw his head back, a dying man's croaking. The noise sloshed with vitriol taped to an eerie silence, diagnostic machines abruptly raucous. Robotics and machine parts were manipulated by Athena in lieu of an actual medical team of flesh.
"After viewing Genji, reading your writings and reviewing your works, I was blinded by your apparent reputation. I thought of you as medicine's vanguard rather than a conventional physician. That was a personal error in judgement."
Hanzo knew any care provider would be deceived by the readily illusory signs and symptoms. Speaking to the absent, what must be depression and self-harm, perhaps his mood swings. "You have no doubt diagnosed me with psychosis, yes? Perhaps schizophrenia this time."
The prevailing problem was that lithium, antipsychotics, and therapy left the delusions and hallucination unaltered and increasingly tangible as years passed. He knew ten years later and weary that his Genji was very real. However, his sparrow was so pitiful, pleading while minced and scarlet from that night.
"Why are you doing this to yourself?"
"I love you." Genji looked closer. "Don't hurt, please?"
"I said not to hurt. You're here for me now, aren't you Anija?" A hand came down on the pill bottle, capped his sake gourd. Nails were in his ears. "I never allowed this."
"I've been on medications, these," a derisive hand waved away the entirety of Angela's profession, "healing sessions and therapy." Hanzo rose, removing the IV and monitoring lines in his arm with well-versed efficiency, Angela already moving to stop him before a strike to her cheek seated her.
The assassin gave her noise a cursory glance, merely relieved she had ceased retain him and removed himself outside the clinic and away from her.
Angela swallowed wetly. "Athena."
"Yes, Dr. Ziegler?"
Angela touched her cheek, feeling blood trickle from her mouth's corners as she continued, "Did...did Agent Shimada strike out at me in your security feed?"
"What?" Athena sounded panicked. "No. Dr. Ziegler are you alright? Are you not safe right now?"
She ignored the alarm from Winston's A.I. "Maybe." Angela wiped at her mouth, circulating nanites already stitching the lacerations inside her mouth from her own teeth. "Contact Genji. Ask him to my office, now if he's free."
Hanzo ignored Susume, seeing D. Va walk towards him and sizing him up. Normally she would bypass him but today she stepped in front of him, bubble gum popping.
He grunted no, shaking his head as Susume went for her eyes. Genji drew his lips back, mutilations bleeding again- bottoms jaw severed from his skull. A trail of his eviscerated kidneys, lungs, and large intestine left trails as the younger hissed, the wound only allowing blood to froth and gurgling from the exposed trachea and esophagus around his unsupported tongue.
Hanzo swallowed the acid traversing his throat back down cowed, averting his gaze.
She watched him oddly, the lack of color to his pallor, the betrayed swallowing of something bitter. It was known what he had done, but tact was for games and battle, for D. Va. Song Hana was curious as she was impertinent. "Everyone talks about how you're crazy." The 'are you?' left stagnant and unsaid.
His voice was dry but he met her evenly. "Do you think I am?"
She shrugged, an adolescent in her inquiry. "You tried killing Genji, right?"
Hanzo scoffed, feeling the tongue against his kyodo-gi, wetting it. "The world would be a much simpler and innately pitiful should a quantified killer only need be insane." Instead they adored it, it paid, or they had no choice or were merely gutless.
"So?" Hana did not enjoy these genres of games.
"If I was as unhinged as this base whispers, it would be more secure."
"Safer?" That was the last thing she expected, the 'how' being interrupted.
"I am intact, only damned."
A typically stiff response, cliché, but something about the hallow eyes, the darkness permeating his side of what should be an equally lit corridor, unsettled her. "Noted."
She was so young and Genji so neglected and spiteful, especially at his induction to Overwatch from his flesh Genji's behest.
"Agent Song." She turned back to him, a soldier now. "Take care of yourself. If I am ever endangered on a mission, a favor, please."
She cocked her head to the side.
"Leave me." To my fate.
III:
Anhiga Calls in Gibraltar