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It wasn’t love. Cole couldn’t love. At least, that was what he told himself for the millionth time, since the sight of Hanzo Shimada had first started to send his poor fool heart into a tizzy. He couldn’t love and that was that.
He watched from his vantage on a rooftop access as Hanzo and Genji bickered below. Their voices rose up to him, arguing about something small and meaningless. Playful jabs and banter intertwined in the words. They hadn’t truly argued in years, but Cole wasn’t listening anyway. His eyes were on Hanzo. Only ever on Hanzo these days. Stoic, solid, deadly beautiful Hanzo.
His eyes wandered up Hanzo’s back as the archer walked away, drinking in the sight of him like Hanzo was an oasis and Cole was a man lost in the desert. He was wearing that shirt Cole loved. The one that clung to all the right places and showed off those gorgeous arms. Cole felt dirty for dragging his eyes over Hanzo, but he couldn’t stop. Not when there was no one to see him indulge in one of his biggest secrets.
He breathed out a plume of smoke, dragging his eyes away. He was a creep and a lecher. A terrible fucking person that didn’t deserve love, even if he could have returned the feelings. He didn't deserve that either.
Hanzo laughed, and Cole's eyes snapped back up, hoping for a glimpse of that smile. He got it and his world compressed around him. His poor fool heart fluttered for a beat, then two, sending an alert to the HUD in his eye. Only lust, he told himself stubbornly as he took another drag on his cigar. It was only ever lust. Cole Cassidy wasn’t capable of love. He hadn’t been capable of love for over a decade. Sure as the metal heart that thumped in his chest and sure as the sun rose.
It was lust. It couldn’t be anything else because Cole Cassidy couldn’t love.
Never mind that most of his dreams of the archer were lazy mornings with kisses on his jaw. Never mind that what he craved wasn’t below the archer’s belt. He craved Hanzo’s smile. His laugh. Drank from them both as if they might solve his every problem. As if they didn't dance him between bliss and despair, life and madness. He chuckled, a high hysterical sound better suited for a ward.
Hanzo and Genji disappeared into one of the lower levels, their laughter cutting off suddenly as the door closed behind them. In their absence, Cole’s world died. The courtyard turned cold and dull, despite the late spring warmth. Despite the laughter of the gulls and the crash of waves below. Even despite the wildflowers blooming on the peripheries of the concrete pads. Without Hanzo, it all faded to the same shades of grey and beige.
Cole sighed and his synthetic lungs rattled, like they always did after he smoked. In a few hours he would pay the price for his vice as his lungs scrubbed themselves and expelled the gunk. At least he could smoke without the risk of lung cancer. Nicotine was one of the few things that kept him halfway sane anymore.
He needed to get down to the range. He hadn't been in days, but his mood had fallen into the gutter. He couldn’t find it in him to pick himself up and continue on. Not today. There would be people there. People who would want him to put on the mask. The one that never cracked. Never hurt. Never stopped smiling. He wasn’t ready to be that person right now. He hadn't been for a while. Especially if Hanzo was there. God, he might just finally lose his mind if Hanzo was there. So instead he stayed put, hiding where no one but Athena knew where to find him.
This spot was one of his havens. A tiny maintenance access no one remembered or looked for because the system it had once supported had been defunct for years. His room was another of his havens, and there was a small cove down by the ocean that he stole away to sometimes. But people knew of the cove. People came by his room to chat. No one came up here. He wasn’t sure any of them knew they could. Genji and Hanzo both preferred the comm tower or the cliffs off to Cole’s left. This place was hidden from both of those spots. As far as Cole knew, he was the only soul on base that knew of this spot, and that suited him fine.
It was an escape from the life below. A life where he had to pretend to be someone he wasn’t. A life where he had to pretend he wasn’t in lo—lust, he reminded himself stubbornly—with the man that had once tried to kill his best friend. A life where he had to pretend that the way Hanzo still raked his eyes over Cole, with the same unimpressed look he’d worn since the day they’d met, didn’t bother Cole. That that look didn’t pull Cole’s world apart at the seams.
He wasn’t in love. He couldn’t love. He repeated those words to himself again as his chest tightened at the image of Hanzo looking right through him hit like a knife in the gut. He wasn’t in love. He couldn’t love.
He couldn’t love.
He wasn’t in love.
He. Couldn’t. Love.
Over and over, like a mantra he repeated the words until the stabbing pain under his ribs dulled to a nagging ache. Never gone, but ignorable. Cole Cassidy wasn’t in love with Hanzo Shimada because Cole Cassidy couldn’t love.
He took another drag on his cigar. The smoke came out in sputters of a shaky breath. He couldn't love. He didn't. He wasn't. That part of him had been ripped out years ago. He had made the call at the first sign of those little bits of feathery red fungus. He’d barely thought about who they could have been for. It hadn’t mattered. In Blackwatch, love was a weakness. Gérard’s grave stood testament to that. So when he had coughed up blood and those ‘petals’ had fluttered to the counter, he’d decided to get the surgery.
The doctors had bullshitted around, letting the infection take his heart, lungs and eye, asking him if he was sure. Asking dozens upon dozens of times if he really wanted to give up his ability to fall in love. As if he hadn’t answered the same way every single time until he’d barely been able to speak from how far the infection had progressed. As if he hadn’t been sure that Blackwatch would kill him before it was over. As if he had ever been anyone worth loving.
They’d only operated once he was on death’s door. He had been out of commission for so long there at the end that when he’d gotten back, Reyes had changed. Blackwatch had gone downhill. Venice had been only six months after he’d been cleared for missions again. All because those damn doctors hadn’t listened.
Angie had been the only one on his side. She was the only one he trusted. The only one he still trusted. She knew his secret—the one where he'd cut out his heart—and sometimes, he caught the sad sighs she gave when she did his routine checkups. Genji might know, but he didn’t act like he did. Cole had never asked what Reyes had told everyone while he’d been gone. Maybe Genji was being polite, trying not to bring up something he thought sore. Cole wasn’t sure if it was a sore subject or not.
In a way it was, he guessed. Like some kinda of cruel joke, scientists had found the ‘cure’ only a year or two after it almost claimed Cole’s life. There had been no new cases in years but the Hanahaki fungus, named after a story from before even Morrison’s time, had left its mark on the world. Increases in suicide rates, people terrified of a common cough, scarred people without the ability to ever love again, and relationships doomed to fail because someone had forced themselves into something they didn’t want out of guilt. It had hit the world like a wrecking ball, and then as quickly as it had come, faded away. Now it was nothing more than fodder for tragic documentaries.
Cole would like to say that not forcing someone into a relationship had been one of the reasons he’d chosen the surgery, but it hadn’t been. He had never been that noble. It had only been so that he could get back to his missions, without the distraction of love or anything like it, because he thought himself a dead man walking on borrowed time.
He coughed, lungs rattling softly. A foul taste bloomed in his mouth and he spat to the side. His lungs were being extra efficient today, apparently. He grabbed the bottle of water he kept on him at all times now and drank deep, washing the taste from his mouth. He ought to stop smoking, but he couldn’t. He’d tried. Without the nicotine, he drank like a fish. Without the nicotine, the façade cracked and he did stupid shit like drunk-texting. He couldn’t afford that with Hanzo around. He couldn’t afford to accidentally dump his heart on the archer.
Not because he worried that Hanzo might reject him. Not because he worried about Hanzo catching feelings for him, the man who couldn’t love. Hanzo couldn’t stand him. He made that apparent at every turn. It was better that way. At least for Hanzo. No, he couldn’t afford to quit because Hanzo might run, and that would be the worst thing that could happen to Cole. For as much as the archer drove him to the very brink of madness, he was also the only thing that gave Cole any reason to keep getting up in the morning. So Cole fled here when it all got to be too much.
He leaned back against the cliff wall that his little island of solitude jutted out of and sighed as the picture of Hanzo’s smile danced in his head. A smile that would never be turned on him. A smile that made the world brighter and shoved knives in Cole’s gut.
In an hour or two, he'd go back down there and pretend he was someone he wasn't. He would go back to work trying to prevent Talon from preying on innocent lives. He would go back to pretending that his feelings for Hanzo were nothing more than base lust and that he was a creep for indulging. Because Cole Cassidy couldn't love.
But for now, for just a breath in time, he'd stop pretending and hold that little light in his frozen metal heart close. Because Cole Cassidy could love, despite all odds...no matter how much he wanted to deny it. And it was going to be the death of him, one way or another.