ultralight

“Perhaps the universe is cruel.”

He does not know her; he looks at her like she’s a revenant, in-between his sight and invisible and it is what breaks her. She covers her mouth with her hands, trying to force the sob torn from between her teeth to stay put, hunched over and kneeling in the grass she can’t even feel, that she cant even remember the feel of. Like a black hole opening up in the pit of her stomach she wants to be sick - she had a hand in this. She looked for Rohan, contacted everyone she could think of and it still wasn’t enough; she wasn’t there to help him, she didn’t look hard enough. Accepted him as dead. (Moved from anguish into laughter and she wonders, did he ever get to smile again?)

She wants - knows - she should be collected, stare down the helicopter and annihilate it with the wrath of a rapture. Let Talon find it and piece it back together and feel what it meant to be on the end of destruction; at the mercy of science and nature and anger and hatred.

“You don’t want to be found by them.” He stumbles backward shakily, and she wishes he were right. She wishes, angrily and stubbornly and all things in between, they would take her so she could spread like a disease through Talon; leave a metallic taste all the way through to its centre, leave the string of electricity in their teeth. Rot the thing from the inside out.

(We’re heroes, she was told once.)

“No,” she whispers out, and it’s lost in the chopping above them. “No, no, no, no, no.” It tumbles out of her mouth like the lock was turned, flooding through her teeth in desperation and she presses her palms to her eyes for a moment. There’s a storm within her, thundering around her bones and rattling them lose - a sickness and an anger and a sense of grief. All of them lost in the years to the monks in Nepal first, and then to the overstuffed blanket of cockiness and time.

“I don’t know what to do,” she can barely get the words out, and they sound pathetic and foreign and grating on her. (You can’t leave again.) There’s nothing else she can think of, besides the thing looming above her.

It peels away at her, listening to the steady rhythm of the blades above, thrashing the tops of the trees about with something too violent the way the trees blossom like a flower to let the buzzard in. It matches a heartbeat (matches the waves of electricity, a metal fist on the enemies tiny, important vessels). It matches the chanting in the monastery, it matches breathing, it matches the beats between thunder and lightning.

She feels pinpricks in the centre of her eyes, pulling at the retinas; filing into points with white heat. It needles down her teeth, down through the roots of her jawbone, crawling up her skull like a heavy spider, strikes in the points that connect a body, screaming over the burns that mark her skin: a map to the machine of her core, through the column steps of her spine. Tangling with the fear and the anger and the hatred in the pit of her stomach.

And what if they take him back? A voice in the back of her head wilts there, something hopeful dying where it was born, crumbling under the weight of fear and disgust. The silent thrum in her chest quickens and she wants to rip out the pieces there, leave them to rust in the grass below the watchful gaze of the trees. She wonders if he can see the heartbreak in her; she wonders if he will leave with her.

The universe is cruel, above all things, and once when Zin was young she believed it would never turn her into a warpath. Something closes off in her, lifting the slats in her arms for pressure and routing through her like a current. She feels as if her head will explode with the flux, the twinge of despair and malice under her skin. The lights built into her wrists flicker, the hum they emit consumed by the echoing of the helicopter.

She’s brought back to the first night, when they told her and when she burned Jesse. The second night when she refused to speak to anyone. The third, fourth, fifth.

The next week at the funeral, (a week, they waited a week,) the day she left. When she broke the bones of a man for speaking to her wrong, when she electrocuted another for telling a joke. Nepal, the small altar for her the monks had made so she would feel like a piece of their Iris. (There was a blade at the centre pinning a photograph like a paperweight, with flowers billowing around it; tinting the blade soft, forcing the flowers to be violent accomplices. All to remind her that he lived, once. )

Her breath comes in gasps and her chest is tight and like a salvo, arms outstretched, she strikes everything all at once. The trees that were blanketed in green and dry bark are blue with light and then orange with fire, the forest igniting itself like a dance down a line. It is quiet, in the eye of the lightning, to her. A calming wave in the middle of a hurricane, like a comforting song or the sound of laughter you recognize.

The tower groans and vibrates like a tuning fork, partially collapsing under the distressed rust at contact, threatening to crush everything beneath it. The lightning barely tips the helicopter, dipping out of the way as it did, but around it is nearly all fire, and she’s been shot before.

(How many of them have experienced their heart stopping at the hands of grief? Have they ever faced what nature had to offer? Have they ever angered a god?) A voice inside her tells her to grab Rohan and run, the speed of light and faster, to anywhere but here. She shakes her head slightly, waving her hand through the light smoke building around them now.  

“I’m here this time,” she breathes out, cradling her own chest like her ribs might spill out of her at any moment, charred black by voltage, and she looks up at him. Her eyes are red rimmed and she knows she looks a mess but she’s here. She knows she shouldn’t read too deeply into his expression, into his words and his voice; but she does, and it brings her back to a time when they watched each others back, when they ran around eerily pristine streets in search of a makeshift adventure, when they were younger and indestructible and made of something celestial. When she never lost.

Every muscle in her body is soft and rigid at the same time - Rohan falls and her heaving breath almost escapes in a torn sob, choked off. Everything; the ancient trees with their peeling bark, aching and the leaves shuddering in the breeze - it feels mournful.

Awareness returns to her like a shudder through her spine, wracking the anger from her; like all she sees is a wounded animal. (He’s alive. He’s alive, he’s hurt. You hurt him. You did this.) She stands in front of him, unmoving. (Waiting, hoping. It isn’t him, he looks so hurt. So tired. He doesn’t look like him but he does; a wraith in a mirror. He’s alive, here. It isn’t him, he died so long ago. Which is worse? Which is more selfish?)

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Like salt in the wound, he sounded defeated - she hates it, it is so unlike her memories that there is an ache in her chest. Zin remembers a time where she could hear the smile in his voice, when the world didn’t punish heroes. She picks up a piece of the mask while she kneels beside him, the lights have gone out in the broken thing, but she turns it over in her hands and remains quiet. 

She throws the half-piece into the darkness of the forest; an offering in place of the shade beside her. (He’s still not... he’s Rohan, but it hurts to say. Like a spear through her chest.) 

“Rohan,” she can barely hear her own voice; so soft and weak. This forest has consumed her, too, stolen the sun and all that is left is a woman that does not know who she is (a coward), kneeling next to a ghost that everyone had forgotten. She drops to her knees beside him; holds him close without thinking. He could slide a knife through the spaces of her ribs; she would let him.

He is so young, he was so loved. He didn’t deserve this.

Zin hated him for saying it. She hated him still, years down the road, for reminding her she’d moved on.

(Went to Nepal, went home. Fought, cried, hated. Repaired, laughed, smiled. Forgot what it felt like to have a fist around her heart.)

The small projectiles clatter into her raised arms, bouncing off the metal without fanfare, but the world stands still and it is like a fork ground down a plate. He closes the distance, strikes at her, mocks her. Zin leans away from the attack, in a daze, but doesn’t move away from him. There is no pulse she can suffer to remind her she’s alive.

She remembers this feeling; the noise metal makes when it strikes a fake, the feeling of crashing through a haze of blue cinders, the sensation of watching yourself from afar: it is all tied together by the thread of one person. (He’s dead. It’s better. He’s dead; you looked, you looked. You weren’t there.)

“What the fuck,” her voice cracks under its whisper, her breathing ragged and heavy in her chest, clawing its way up and leaving pock marks instead of words. (When she pieces an omnic back together, she wonders if they like this: the fleeting sadness that comes with memory; she wondered, once in Nepal, why they so desperately wanted to join the rest of the world in its misery.)  

“Who taught you that?” Her eyes are hot, beneath the green blinking light and the stench of pine sap leaking from the ground. “Who the fuck taught you that?” She twists and shoulders him in the centre of his chest, grabbing his wrist so he won’t knock over and scuttle away.

Anger, someone once said, was one of the stages of grief; if it were true perhaps mourning lasts in the back of the skull without its host knowing. A parasite or a phantom, latched on and ticking away at the nerves reminding you it’s there - it’s always there. It was there when she wasn’t.

The lightning pulses through her heart, again. Stinging its way up her spine, finding it’s route through her body like it was not a foreign element leaving burns across her skin. A piece of her, like Rohan’s smile (his death), like her absentee father, like Machinist. Like the memory of bruises left after a fistfight - they fade but they were there, once.

She stares into the glaring blue lights of his mask, an attempt to be menacing, as futile as trying to pray for sunrise in the evening. She pulls his arm down by the wrist, elbows his mask; metal to metal, the clang of opposing forces rings out in the canopy filled with rust and dead things.

“Is this some fuckin’-” the words almost get lost in her frenzy to break the mask, almost get lost in her throat. Her jaw constricts for a moment, she can’t feign away the look of fear on her face; “is this a joke?” Zin's breathing is loud and the words come out louder - the claws that let go ages ago seep back in just enough to choke her.

She hasn’t said his name since the funeral on Gibraltar - standing over the small bird grave like the trees tower over them now. She can’t say it even now, like invoking a ghost three times in a mirror.

(Murderers, the people whispered at first. Then the walls of Overwatch outposts bared the scars of the screaming, the hatred, the folly of righteousness.)

Death is pungent and copper and tangy, but the forest leaves with you dirt and moss and the smell of tree sap and rain. Both impart something, neither leave - much like when siblings fight each other for fun, like when an immovable force meets an unstoppable one. When Talon and Overwatch meet - when trees are uprooted, they lay where they are left, dying, rotting. Forgotten.

That was his story; now. Leave his bones to sink into the trampled grass of a Talon outpost - teach them not to fuck with a force of nature. Teach them that lightning is cyclical, returning and recoursing. (Heroes never die.)

“Mm,” she nods, a sarcastic noise in the face of a threat. He intimidates like Zin has never been on the business end of a knife - like she had never invited the challenge of avoiding the entire concept of being stabbed.

(“Just do it, you fuckin’ baby!” she taunts him, sticking her tongue out and pretends to grimace. “Come at me, come on. Do it.” “I’m not gonna stab you,” a bluff at indigence, real life disrespect for elders and siblings in the same fell swoop. Zin smiles impishly, “bet you can’t, then, huh?”

He half heartedly throws a knife her way.)

She backs away, inch by inch, while he strides forward. He’s skinny, but hopefully not as fast (at the speed of light, Zin is always faster). She’d been backed flush against the tower beams now, flakes of rust crackling off onto her, the crunch of deadened branches below her feet drawing attention to her steps.

“Last time I checked, Germany is a free country, yebo?” Arms still raised, she can feel the electricity pulsing through her heart, up her spine - into where it needs to be to strike him down. “So I’ll just… continue,” she flashes him a smile, eyes the small black box (mithril made, trademark) she was abusing before.

A forest is never safe, in the darkness, she knows this; and you are never truly alone in it. It devours everything and spits out the bones so they can knit with the trees and the moss and the ground. There is something so lonely about a forest, and yet there are ghosts sewn into its fabric.

The feeling of dread swells in her throat, and she swallows it whole. An unknown feeling to Zin, its edges are sharp and it burns its way down, grappling onto her sternum and her ribs and settling in her lungs, closing tighter and tighter. The universe is bent here, folding in on itself. Unfolding; moving but static. In their silence she doesn’t move, doesn’t turn around - it’s foolish and stupid of her; she’s skilled at fighting (murderer,) but in the midst of trees (highly flammable, do not ignite, run like hell) she’s next to powerless. Dread does not suit her well, but they sounded calm, as if she is a house cat that’s up to something. It worries her.

The rusted tower creaks, mimicking the song of the trees around it; the generators white noise backing it all furiously in the back of her head. It mocks their silence, mocks Zin for faltering; for walking into this place as if she were an unkillable god.

“I- ah, no, thank you.” She tries her best to sound cheery, like she’s stumbled upon this place by pure accident, as if a civ is ambling their way through the Teutoburg this far in for no purpose. She turns, and Zin half expects fodder to be guarding this place - but there’s something so menacing about the polished mask; like a seraph there are glowing eyes watching her, knives shimmering against the darkness. (You glow, too, she tells herself. A couple of strobe lights face off in the forest.)

“I’m not armed,” she puts her hands up.