There was no love lost between them, at the start, and no words either. One tense meeting, the personas they’d made for themselves clashing and driving them apart.
Two bitter, broken men with too much on their minds to notice all the things on their minds were the same.
Three months, four missions, five seconds to make a choice. Six shots and six bodies in a neat row. Seven millimeters from making Hanzo Shimada one of the bodies, but Jesse McCree was good at snap decisions and better at shooting.
Not so good at communicating.
Eight frantic heartbeats pounding in his head when Hanzo Shimada punched him in the face on the way back to the Watchpoint. Nine stitches. Ten minutes of Jack and Angela yelling at them both.
A dozen roses for an apology, eleven in a vase, one held so tightly in his metal hand that the stem crushed and the whole thing wilted pathetically when he held it out as a peace offering in the doorway of a shocked Hanzo’s room.
Thirteen words between them.
“You are a blind fool.”
“I see what I want pretty clearly, darlin’.”
Fourteen articles of clothing discarded on the way to the bed, and then time stretched out and the earlier numbers ceased to matter.
Infinite
breathless
sounds
and neither of them counted them.