NEVER BE LIKE YOU

“I don’t know what to do,”

A hissing crack; the sound of splintering trees. Rohan’s eyes flash, watching the wicked light burst through the other’s arms and slice into the forest with an almighty snarl. The tree line erupts orange and violent, wildfire racing through twisting leaves. Branches sizzle and drop away, embers catching and eating at the grass before hurtling along the border of the clearing. It was green, and blue, and white hot red. He watches it distantly, but in his ears his heartbeat quakes. The ghost sensation of heat rips up his arm, his eyes close and he feels the white sting of it in his jaw. It feels so real, so visceral, that his eyes are sharp with terror when they open again.  

The radio tower creaks above them, wounded by a snake strike of electricity,  metal scraping as it sways and collapses on its supports. It is an old creature, beyond its years, but it valiantly tries to withstand the force, it valiantly doesn’t crush them all. The fire wants to take everything, the trees and the grass and the sky and them.

Smoke curls in his throat, breathing feels raw with thorns when he looks across the clearing at the woman raining hell upon the forest. She is an immovable force amongst this hurricane, the eye of it, its origin, lightning cracking in excess away from her hands and the agony of it ripping holes in the thick trees. What is he to a force of nature? What are knife handles and triggers?

“I’m here this time.”

He looks at her oddly, like he can’t understand the words she says, stepping back, like the forest will crowd around him and shroud him from the wrath. She is singing him with every word; she is in every fragment of his memory, knifing through it like her lightning and forcing the pieces together. He is thinking of pitch black rooms, he is thinking of ones so bright they blind. 

 I don’t leave if you don’t I don’t leave if you don’t Idon’tleaveifyoudon’t. He catches himself entertaining the thought, but there’s no plan here, no way for this to end well. He’s dimly aware of the fire crawling a path around him, catching at his clothing like curled fingers. How much time did he have now? Seconds? His eyes flicker at her, unreadable, and then to the sky, to the chopper where it looms. Resolve falters and then curls tight in his chest again when he forces his eyes back to her. The smoke is stinging at his eyes, he thinks. Ten seconds, he thinks.

“Zin,” his voice is harsh, burning itself on her name when he forces it through is teeth. “Don’t look for me again.”

Rohan flicks his gaze back to Cass quickly when she speaks. She dismisses him with an uninterested response, and that seems a little more par the course, so he shrugs. Her brief flicker of what had seemed empathetic was gone now, and he thinks on her response with a small frown. His mouth opens once to ask “is it because you’re part robot?” but he swiftly manages to stifle it. 

His eyebrows shoot up. “Guns?” He glances somewhat warily at the metal legs on the other, as though trying to imagine where the bullets went in. “--That’s awesome. I don’t know how that works at all, but that’s awesome.” He always had felt a bit out of depth around the likes of companions that could create projectiles from their hands, and this felt similar. There were only so many tricks you could run against someone like that before you ran out, got a face full of fireball.

He remains in place obediently, glancing at the held up fingers curiously to consider the ultimatum. Although he’s not terribly threatened by the medic, the look he’s fixed with makes him feel sufficiently scorned, accompanied by a painful pang in the pit of his chest.

“Please be more careful, Rohan,” a weary, but kind smile. “I only have so much bandage.”

The first option presented is, of course to go to a proper clinic with proper tools, and with the second, Rohan reacts with a visible shudder. Along with an aversion to needles came one related to the so-called medical advancements utilized among Overwatch and Talon alike. He had experienced enough of such on the regular that it makes him recoil a bit from the doctor.

“Wow, both so tempting,” he says softly, after a long moment. He blinks distantly, looking past Hector and weighing the options. The more he looks at the other, the more his mind buckled under the effort of trying to remember, and the concept of spending more time near him than absolutely necessary instantly exhausts him. Talon would be looking soon, anyway, he reasons.

“Mm, I forgot to tell you.” He had forgotten to mention a few things, lately. He thinks of the two figures through the smoke at King’s Row. He thinks of the forest, and the electric hands. “I ran into him, and someone else--” They were familiar, “out on a quick extraction thing in the city. He smoked out the whole place, but I got out of there okay.“ He pauses, rubbing at his eyes. “Seemed like Overwatch types.” For a moment he wanted to talk about who he had seen, in the old forest off-base, how she had lit the trees up in flames, how she had held onto him like he meant something to her.

He discards the thought, letting himself latch onto Yves’ voice as they spoke again. He glances at the prosthetic briefly, and throws his hands up absently: “not at all, man.” He forgets, sometimes, about Yves’ prosthetic; of all the things he’d experienced, he had no idea what limb loss felt like. He had heard it was sometimes like the piece was still there, even when it wasn’t. That part, he could understand.

They watch the movie in silence for a while, but Rohan’s eyes are scanning the room like a pendulum swing, silent and curious.

“Yves,” he says after a long moment, and then lets the other’s name hang in the air while he gathers up the question he wants to ask.

He flinches away, all wild eyes and animal reaction at first, every muscle tensed in expectation, and he’s stunned into silence when she only wraps her arms around him, holds him close. His eyes close, a held breath rattles out of him. He’s stiff in her embrace for a long time, a tremble starting in his hands and working up his spine until a silent, stifled sob shakes his ribcage and all the nerves release in his tired form. It feels familiar, it’s not fair. She’s coming into view in the fog, but she’s not, she’s not close enough to hold onto.

“You’re okay,” Someone had once held him close, just like now. “Look at me, you’re okay.”

“I’m sorry,” he mutters, because he’s not sure what else will suffice. He’s not sure anything will. She sounds so wounded; he can’t unravel the knots of grief and distrust and fear. Her tears are dampening his shirt, and he’s in the middle of the ocean, waves swaying him to numbness. She’s a messy patchwork of his memories, and he can’t feel anything properly. It’s unfair. He lets her hold onto him.

“I,” he starts, and his voice gets caught in thorns. He can feel his heart trying to close down around the foreign emotions.“I’m not who you remember.” He says, quiet, and he can’t look at her.

“What did they do to you?”

His throat constricts, he feels his scars one by one mapped across his skin. He can’t answer, eyes lost in the dark tree line beyond where they had both fallen.

The voice in his ear sounds like sneering teeth. “Yeah, kid, what did we do to you?” The static and his heartbeat run alongside one another. “You remember, right? We can make it happen to her, too. You could have something in common.”

Suddenly the fire in his chest is visceral and all consuming and he tears the radio piece from his ear, watching it skip through the grass. His hand is shaking where it had gripped it. For the first moment in a long string of moments, light filters in the form of brief agency, and he laughs, the sound quaking and broken. His eyes sting, but his expression is dark when he looks up, up at the sky.

“You know how everything is made of stardust? When I die, I want to become stars again.“

A helicopter’s wingbeats sound overhead, metal whirring as it peels the tree line back in a perfect circle. There’s too much light now, blinding, sharp and violent. The machine tears at the forest, it shakes and quivers under its claws. He steels himself and shuts down, lets the numb touch his fingers like frostbite, lets it eat its way into his lungs and chest and heart. He slowly but firmly starts to untangle from her, something in his heart screaming at him weakly and distantly. He wants to stay here. He can’t stay here. Neither of them can stay here.

Her voice is jarring, she sounds like how fire feels, she sounds like burn wounds. “Who taught you that?”  He’s silent, trying to land his knives across unprotected skin, but he feels like the earth is about to open up and swallow him, he feels like he’s about to stumble into a fissure. “Who the fuck taught you that?” His movements start to feel heavy, slow where they should be sharp. He knows better.

Again. Get the fuck up.

His head hurts, he can’t clear the fog, he can’t do anything.

“Leave,” he tries to snarl, but he’s tired, his voice falters,  “Leave, I don’t want to hurt you,” he’s bordering on a desperation he doesn’t understand.

“Do you think that’s your friend? You don’t have any,” He barely registers the radio’s crackle.

If you had any, they’d be dead. If you had any, they weren’t looking for you. Overwatch collapsed. They died. She died. He was too close to his opponent now, and his memories were clawing at him.

She shoves into him with her shoulder, knocking the wind out of him. He grunts and moves to toss a knife, but the static buzzing off her snares his arm and the knife slips from twitching fingers. Electricity bites at fried nerve endings and freezes his hand. It catches him off guard, and she yanks him down at the wrist, delivering a harsh blow to the black glinting plate.

Metal resounds against metal, he feels it in his teeth and he tastes blood. The metal chips, cracks. He rips his wrist from her grip, nerves static screams as he lashes back at her viciously.

“Is this a joke?” Her words are slipping beneath his skin like shards of glass, they’re digging where they shouldn’t. The look on her face is what makes him hesitate, like an arrow, like a bullet, bursting through where he thinks a heart should be.  If there was anything there, he’d understand why he felt like this, wouldn’t he? If his head or heart, if they worked, he could understand.

Bang, you’re dead.

Almost light-headed, he listens to her yell at him. She keeps throwing punches, and he lets her, half heartedly blocking her every few swings and letting her walk him backward, steadily losing the will to continue until one particularly harsh hit knocks his head to the side, the mask thunder cracking as a fissure breaks it diagonal. Blood. He’s broken the skin on his lip, he realizes absently. It curls a red streak up his face. He staggers, watches the gleaming halves land in the tall grass. He drops with them, dizzied to one knee, fingers curling at the earth like he’d ever be able to hold onto it.

He was glad for Yves’ neutralizing presence at his side. He felt bad, waking them up like that, but in his mind it had been urgent at that moment, so much so that he couldn’t remain locked up in his cold room. His friend’s apartment had always felt a little more like home than his own. Yves was assigned to him as a partner, probably in equal parts to ground and control him, but they were never really trying to do the latter. 

He blinked, almost startled by the question, or perhaps at not being brushed off. It took a moment to get his jaw working out a response, eyebrows furrowed slightly. His head was sleepless and hazy, the details of the room cloudy to his eyes.

“...Yeah,” he answered softly, and then shrugged. “But, hey, what’re you gonna do, right?” He smiled, taking the invitation to wander further into the spotless training room. “I woke up Yves here, because I’m a bad friend,” he said with a tired laugh. He shot the other an apologetic look quickly, though. “You didn’t have to come, if you didn’t want to.” 

Rohan’s gaze fell to Cass’ helmet, listening to the harsh, digital sound of her voice coming through it. He hadn’t ever asked, but whispers around base said that she needed it to breathe, that she never took it off; his chest gave a sympathetic ache. 

“You too? Or do you always come here at this time?” Or is that none of your business. He didn’t have more than one hand of people who had given him the time of day around the Talon base. Most had their own agendas, or looked at him like they knew something he didn’t. 

Science experiment. 

His eyes lifted again to Cass as he crossed into the room, searching out a pair of gloves.

Bet you I can dodge it

His heartbeat slows until he can hear it, watching the sparks slow as his pupils turn to pinpricks in his eyes. Draw first, a drawling voice says. Watch her hands. You can’t dodge that; you have to anticipate it. Light room. Two figures that are very close, but obscured the way a blurry photograph is; a capture of movement and feeling and colour. 

So it’s like in your movies? The cowboys taking the ten paces? He almost says it out loud, remembering how it felt when he created the words in his throat.

The blue forms in her palm when she aims at him, his heartbeat is a staccato thunder now. The voice in his head and the one in front of him are ringing at the same pitch, and its piercing, disorienting, like a sucker punch. 

It’s lightning, you idiot.

Rohan throws himself backward, leaving a perfect double in his place as he rolls to his feet, skidding on his heels just as the electricity bursts through the holo in a violent crack. The copy jolts in place, limbs locked by the biting nails of electricity. Pain explodes in his chest and he staggers, the ghost of the damage done to his double lancing up his side. That, he can shake, he convinces himself. That’s not the real thing. 

He can’t fight that this far away. His one advantage was his armour over hers at a closer range. Though, that also meant getting closer to those electric hands. His mind is reeling; scar, hair, bright smug smile, electric hands. His mind responds blank, blank space. That’s not her. It’s not.

He watches her attacks connect with the double, unable to move past its weak twitches in the clutch of her deadlock. It finally flickers and shatters with a solid knock to the chin, fragments dropping to a scatter of blue dust. Through the debris whirl two knives, turning in menacing glints as they sail toward their target. As soon as they’re gone from his hands, he’s drawing new ones, moving forward to close the distance again as the flickered fragments disappear around him.  

There hadn’t been much of a discussion, just a knock on the door and a restless pair of sleepless eyes; “I just, need to, okay?” Yves hardly said no to him, even when his ideas were questionable. They ended up before the doors of Talon’s training facilities, sleek and black and armed to the teeth. The night was warm, and the crickets scattered cries around them. He tipped his chin to his friend, hands shoved in his pockets.

“I swear it’s really quiet in here around this time.”

He knew, because he’d routinely snuck off here alone; to collect himself in the still air, where he didn’t have eyes on him. Truthfully, he didn’t mind anywhere where the voice wasn’t in his ear and people weren’t making notes on his every movement. 

Sporting rather casual attire, it felt odd to be approaching the building. Rarely did he see anyone, let alone himself wandering the halls sans the weight of heavy combat armour, so the moment he spotted someone else in the training room, he immediately wanted to backtrack. Yves, he trusted. Yves had seen all of it; every cloudy purple bruise and ugly mark. But other people? He wanted their eyes away from the jagged scores in his skin. 

Still, he cleared his throat, offering up a casual half-wave as he stepped into the room. The figure was familiar instantly, and he lightly shouldered Yves. 

Have you ever been lost in a forest? The trees seem taller for a moment, they  reach and dig fingers into the blue skyline, they rustle and creak. He hears them, the leaves, individual in their wind crackle, chattering in the absence of birds. It almost dizzies him, and he tries desperately to shake the echo in his skull. Do you know how quiet it is? How alone you are? The branches rattle again in his peripherals, the wind calling out its presence. 

He’s looking at her face, mind charting courses in circles, connections breaking off in smoking spirals. His gaze lifts to her hands, raised in surrender. Somehow he knows they are dangerous, it prickles at the back of his neck like static, and muscles tense up, asking fight or flight. The answer is always fight, and he runs a thumb against the edge of his knife, feeling how close it is to breaking the skin.

“Civilians don’t wander this far into the forest by accident,” he says, tone light even while it held a threat. “People get lost here, you know.”

The forest will not help you, even when you scream.