CYOA – Life And Death Situations – Chapter 13 (Patreon)

Rather than focus on Lúcio/Gabriel, we decided to see what Hanzo/Jesse are up to later in the chapter...

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“What the Hell is that supposed to even mean? What… what is he talking about?” Jesse is standing in the blink of an eye. Lúcio can see spots of agitation crawling up his neck. He usually is such a relaxed guy, but even Jesse obviously has his limits.

Lúcio lifts his hands in defence.

“Calm down. I don’t know either.” He turns towards Gabriel, his blood pressure rising when he sees his smug expression. He likes stirring drama entirely too much.

“What are you talking about?”

Gabriel swims away from the immediate front of the tank and starts to coquettishly slide behind one of the large structures within that are to give him protection if he wants to hide for a bit.

“Just what I said,” comes the purring answer from above. Lúcio does not want to get excited goosebumps from it but his body is trained to respond to Gabriel’s voice like a dog.

He inhales sharply.

“That’s no answer and you know it. Why would he be ‘one of you’?”

Jesse is coming closer now. Lúcio wonders if he realizes how he is clasping his left forearm tightly.

Gabriel is not answering, just watching them from behind his boulder, his whole demeanor screaming satisfied feline. He loves having their attention (Lúcio’s… attention), and he loves being obtuse.

“He smells like the sea,” comes the answer from above, and Jesse makes an impatient sound that Lúcio has never heard from him before. There is a vein swelling at the side of his neck as he stares into the tank.

“Of course I do! I’m a goddamn lifeguard!”

Gabriel’s smile widens.

“If you say so,” comes the crooned response from above. Lúcio balls one hand into a fist, then makes himself relax again. What a brat.

“Jesse, listen. This is not helping,” he says, turning towards him, very aware of Gabriel staring at him eagerly; waiting for more attention. He reaches up and curls his arms around Jesse’s biceps, steering him away from Gabriel and ignoring the dissatisfied growl from the speakers when the hybrid watches him touch Jesse.

“We’re all beat. How about you sleep here for the night? Tomorrow’s… Saturday? Right? No work. We can sleep in, have a nice breakfast, and then go at it with a cooler head.”

Jesse rubs his hand across his face with a soft groan.

“Yeah… Yeah, maybe you’re right. I just don’t feel myself right now.”

Lúcio makes a commiserating sound, leading Jesse towards the couch.

“It’s been a long day,” he confirms softly, gently sitting Jesse down on the cushions. “Will you be alright here? We could also swap, if you don’t feel fine with Gabriel. Though he’ll be quiet.”

Jesse shakes his head halfway through Lúcio’s suggestions, scratching through his hair.

“Naw… I mean, no. No it’s alright. I just…” he lets himself fall to the side, head hitting the decorative cushion on the end of the couch. Lúcio nods in understanding.

He hurries out to fetch a blanket, but by the time he’s back, Jesse is already snoring softly, his face pale and tight like he’s still having a headache. Lúcio sighs and carefully lifts his legs up onto the cushions, then tugs the blanket around him.

When he turns around, he sees that Gabriel has moved right up against the glass, fingers splayed against it, face a mask of jealousy.

Lúcio feels a vindictive little twist in his chest, thinking ‘good’.

“You’ll let him sleep, alright?” he tells him in a half-whisper. Gabriel looks stubborn but he nods even so and turns to slip back behind the rock formations within the blink of an eye.

Lúcio goes to bed wondering about the happenings of the day.

---

Jesse rolls onto his back and throws an arm across his face. It’s so dark in the room still, but he can’t sleep anymore. He’s been pulled awake by his own wandering thoughts, twisting and turning like swirl of water around what Gabriel has said.

There’s a soft crackling above preceding the silky voice of the hybrid in the tank a few meters away from him, giving him just a little bit of time to prepare himself.

“It’ll become harder to breathe, you know.”

Jesse stubbornly keeps quiet, even as his heartbeat speeds up. There’s a soft splashing to his left, and goosebumps rise all over his body as he imagines the octopus man to slowly crawl out of his tank.

When he has enough nerves to glance over, though, Gabriel is nowhere to be seen. Still hiding, probably.

“Your body’ll start changing,” he whispers over the speakers, voice pitched low to make sure he won’t wake Lúcio, probably. “You can’t control it yet.”

Jesse slowly sits up. He can’t remember when he’s last eaten something, but he feels nauseous as if he’s going to retch it all onto the floor anyway.

“I’d go back, if I were you” Gabriel continues softly, diction perfect. “To the sea. Before you’ll flop on the ground like a fish. Gasping. Slowly suffocating.”

Jesse swallows hard. His mouth is dry. His tongue feels swollen, head pulsating like an open wound. He feels like he can see Gabriel’s eyes from behind the rocks, strangely luminous.

He’s up and running before he makes a conscious effort.

.o.

Lúcio moves into his living room far earlier than he usually would on a Saturday, but his body has told him that it is done sleeping.

He only takes a couple steps in until he sees the blanket fallen to the ground like it had hung on to someone’s foot for a few steps before it had been thrown off.

His brain stalls, staring at the vacated couch.

“Where is Jesse?” he finally asks, glancing over to the tank where Gabriel is slowly pushing up against the glass, his face confused and worried.

“Don’t know. Was asleep.”

.o.

Jesse has no recollection of running through the city towards the beach. His head is filled with thoughts of growing gills and of suffocating on land. And maybe it wouldn’t stop there, either? Maybe his limbs will soon retract into his body, and he will grow scales until he is nothing more than a guppy flopping around…

Those are ridiculous thoughts, of course, but they get his heart pounding and sweat to prickle along his hairline. He can’t remember when he’s last eaten (probably something during lunch break yesterday), and he is starting to become nauseous from hunger.

By the time he is crawling over the large boulders sectioning off the more dangerous part of the beach, he is out of breath and woozy, legs so weak he stumbles and almost falls to the rocky shore.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing here, really. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to accomplish. Gabriel’s low, ominous voice keeps crawling through his head.

It’ll become harder to breathe, you know.

Your body’ll start changing.

Jesse hasn’t thought of himself as someone prone to panic attacks, but for the second time (or third? he’s lost count) in 24 hours he finds he has to bend over and breathe into the palms of his hands cupped in front of his mouth.

The twinkling of blue scales from the corner of his eyes distracts him somewhat. He looks up.

Hanzo is there, perched calm and beautiful on the rock his brother had been sitting on last night. There’s not a single hair out of place. He looks like he’s been there for hours, and Jesse honestly wouldn’t be able to say whether that is true or not; he’s been in a tunnel getting here, body prickling with sweat.

“You are bleeding, human,” Hanzo calls over disdainfully, and when Jesse just stares at him, he glances down until Jesse follows his gaze, numbly staring at his naked feet.

He hasn’t put on any shoes, he realizes dully. He’s just got up and ran, chased out of Lúcio’s house by Gabriel’s cool, frightening voice and his own mounting panic.

His feet are dirty and bleeding, and slowly he becomes aware of the throbbing pain of dirt and sand smeared into the cuts.

“Damn!” he hisses and carefully has to sit himself down on the unforgiving ground, helplessly staring at them.

Hanzo watches him with a weird squint from his perch.

“Why did you do that?” he calls over eventually.

Jesse shakes his head and grabs at his hair with both hands, pulling hard enough to dull the throbbing pain radiating off of his feet. He’s cold and miserable, just in jeans and a thin t-shirt because he’s a goddamn idiot that ran out of his friend’s house like a spooked colt and didn’t even don shoes or a fucking jacket.

.o.

Hanzo watches Jesse from afar, his self-righteous anger fizzling out somewhat as he sees him sitting there looking a picture of misery.

He waits for a moment whether McCree will answer him, but when nothing is forthcoming, he haltingly slides into the water to get closer. He hisses, a slew of bubbles rising from his mouth when he moves his tail and it aches. A dull throb that stuns him for a moment as he tries to come to grips with it.

He is not unused to these phantom aches and pains – none of their kind is. He is attached to Genji deeply, feeling his little brother’s wounds echoing through his own body, but this… is not Genji.

Just as the force pulling him back towards this beach has not been his brother. Genji is still prowling the waters around the human facility, waiting for them to give him Zenyatta back.

Hanzo reluctantly gets closer to the human sitting on the beach and shivering miserably. When he pokes his head out of the water again, he is a bit shocked at how close McCree suddenly is. He can see him a lot better like this; the bronze of his skin; the dark hair on his arms.

Hanzo has never before seen someone this… hirsute. Their kind is not prone to body hair, as it would disturb the currents of the water around them.

His tail keeps aching, and his eyes flick down to Jesse’s feet, which are bloody and dirty.

He has no idea where the human just came from or what he’s been doing, but seeing him like this makes him wonder yet again about how wise it is to be trusting them in anything. The other one has told Genji exactly what he needed to hear in order to be absolutely smitten with at least those two, which makes distrusting them even more difficult for Hanzo.

He is lying on his belly in the shallows, slowly lifting his head out of the waters. He’s close enough to touch Jesse, but also hasn’t stranded himself enough to be helpless.

Jesse seems so out of it, he doesn’t even lift his head to look at Hanzo which gives him the time to try and peek at his forearm. There they are. The slashes; still dark and visible and sharp, but before he can wonder about them, a smell hits his nose that has him almost reel back.

.o.

“What is this?!”

Hanzo’s angry hiss has Jesse look up, heart spasming in his chest as he sees how close the hybrid suddenly is. He hadn’t even noticed him coming closer, too caught up in his own problems.

“What d’you mean?” he asks slowly, his tongue feeling swollen in his mouth. Hanzo’s arm jerks out of the water with the speed of a striking snake, and before Jesse can jerk back, his hand is already curled around his left forearm, pulling him forward until he is almost pulled onto his knees.

There are thin webs between Hanzo’s fingers, and their touch is cool and clinging like wet silk. It makes goosebumps race up along his arms and down his back. Jesse watches dumbly as Hanzo gets his face up close to the slashes he’s left there a few weeks ago, inspecting them with a tight, serious expression before he gets even closer and begins to sniff at them.

Jesse’s fingers spasm slightly, almost touching the long ink black hair. Eventually, Hanzo lets go of him with a sound so disgusted and derisive that Jesse flushes despite himself.

“What was that?” he asks softly.

Hanzo looks away, seemingly bored, but his tail swishing through the water behind him belies his agitation.

“You smell like…”

One of us. Jesse’s heart sinks.

“...family.” Hanzo sounds reluctant. He keeps eying Jesse’s forearm and the slashes he’s left behind.

“What does that mean?” Jesse asks softly, his deep voice brittle. He pulls his arm closer to his chest, staring at it as well.

“I don’t know,” Hanzo admits with a scowl, dark eyes squinting at Jesse. “You should be dead,” he tells him bluntly, but Jesse doesn’t even flinch this time. He starts to feel calmer; like he’s over being confused and scared after nonstop waves of adrenaline for the last 24 hours.

“But I’m not,” he says slowly.

Hanzo looks chagrined, and Jesse snorts weak and exhausted. “Well damn. Excuse me fer rescuin’ you and not dyin’ for the privilege.”

“You didn’t rescue me!” Hanzo hisses back immediately, hand slapping the surface of the water. He seems a lot less scary when he’s throwing a tantrum like a little kid. “I would have gotten out of that mess without your help!”

“Hmn. Or you would’ve attracted someone less benign as me.”

“You mean someone else who’d just bring their friends to gawk at us?! And capture us?!”

Jesse squints at him with a queer little expression.

“You mean you are pissed off because I brought Lúcio? I only did that because I thought he’d be able t’ help y’all. And he was, I might add. What the fuck are you angry about?”

Hanzo bristles, but McCree just looks at him calm and exhausted.

“Who says you won’t bring more and more the next times you come here?”

“Who says you’ll even be here? You and your brother don’t have t’ come back.”

Hanzo flushes dully, unprepared for Jesse countering him. He slowly lowers himself into the water until he is in it up to his nose. As he stares at him, Jesse finally extends his long legs with a hiss. The ache in Hanzo’s tail flares simultaneously.

“I’d like to just… know what is happening to me,” Jesse says eventually. Hanzo slowly lifts back up, his arm extending and hand curling around Jesse’s ankle slowly.

They stare at each other uncomfortably but Jesse does not pull away from the touch. It feels like they’re having an uneasy truce for the moment.

“I don’t know either. All I know is that you smell familiar now. Not like us, but like you could become like us.”

He pulls Jesse’s foot closer, intent on cleaning it in the salty water, but McCree balks.

“Uh… I don’t want t’ get infected.”

Hanzo narrows his eyes at him, fishing out his satchel with first aid goods.

“Just come here, you stubborn fool.”

Jesse shakes his head but he does not pull his leg away again. He lifts one hand and drags it across his face.

“So uh… I won’t… I won’t just stop being able to breathe or some shit?” his voice is trembling all over the place and Hanzo looks up from cleaning the sole of his foot with a small soft sponge.

“What makes you think that?”

Jesse shrugs and shakes his head. He looks absolutely miserable.

“I don’t think that-”

“Jesse!”

Both their heads snap around at the sudden cry. Jesse can just about see Lúcio’s head over the edge of the large boulders separating the beaches.

There is a splash and he is sprayed with ice cold water. When he turns back, Hanzo is gone, having fled like a skittish animal.

Lúcio scrambles over the rocks. His face looks pale beneath his dark skin, eyes big as saucers as he runs towards Jesse, a bundle of Jesse’s clothes in his arms.

“Jesse! Oh my God, I had been so worried!”