Headcanons about how Hanzo / Genji / 76 would react to having to suddenly care for a newborn (not theirs, let's go with sudden infant shows up plot device)
//Rises from the dead//. Did you guys miss me? I missed you. Happy New Year!!!
Have you seen that photo of someone holding a baby/toddler at arms length while eyeing it suspiciously? Because that’s Hanzo when he finds a baby outside his motel room while traveling. To be honest, he isn’t really sure what to do or how to handle a child -- hell, most days he has a hard enough time handling himself let alone a tiny defenseless human being who can’t do anything for themselves. He manages though, wrapping the baby back up in the blankets and carrier they were left in and heads off to the nearest convenience store to pick up supplies that he is lacking for the baby until he can figure out what to do with this tiny person that just came into his life. His nights, once silence and used for meditation are now muddled with cries and the typing, searching for a lost child or a place for this child that’s more stable, more worthy of them than him, he only rises to feed and rock the baby to sleep before returning to his search. By the time he finds them a home, he’s grown so attached to the small one that he has to hold back tears, they were his constant companion for more than a month, and now, he returns to solitude, and they, they get a life more deserving of them than an orphan child playing sidekick to a mercenary. Unbeknownst to him, the family that took in the child gave them the name that Hanzo used, a way to thank this man for giving all three of them this gift.
It wasn’t unusual for people to leave children at the places that Zenyatta and Genji visited; people not wanting their children to suffer so they leave them in more capable hands. The cards they leave on the children break Genji’s heart, begging for a better life for their child and Genji can’t help but take a personal interest in these children. Blankets and heating pads wrap around his chest as he rocks the children, softly singing Japanese lullabies as their cries stop and their hands wrap around the edges of the blanket that covers him. There are often moments he imagines himself a father, he sees these children that coo and giggle at the sight of him, unafraid of the visor and the man of metal and finds this ache in his chest at all that he’s lost in this life, that these children will move on, brought to better situations to grow and laugh and play and become more than they could ever have here with him, even have families of their own. It makes the ache grow worse, but it doesn’t make him care any less -- he loves every child he comes in contact with, wanting them to know love from the earliest moment they can. As each of them leave, taken to better situations, Genji can’t help but selfishly hope that maybe just one of them will remember the man of metal and come find him one day.
Jack Morrison was prepared for a lot in his many, many years of living. An infant left in the streets, however, was not one of them. He couldn’t just leave it there of course, but he didn’t have the first clue in child care, let alone care for an infant -- the closest he had come was when Gabriel had dragged Jesse McCree from the Deadlock Gang kicking and screaming, like a toddler -- but the boy was sixteen not six months. Taking a deep breath he returned to his tiny hole in the wall base of operations with the wailing child in tow. Eventually the baby drifts off and he quickly searches how to take care of an infant and skims what he can of the first websites to pop up only to jump as the baby begins screaming again -- they’re probably hungry right? Or does he need to… Christ he doesn’t have any diapers or anything to take care of this kid, what was he thinking? Taking a deep breath he takes the child in his arms, gently rocking while singing some long forgotten lullaby -- the kid was tough, he’d have to give them that, brave and strong to stay out in that wild world by themselves and as their tear filled eyes close he makes them a promise to find them somewhere safe.
