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001.
They met in Istanbul.
Perhaps meeting is too glorious a term for it. They have seen each other before, have met on the field beneath the spray of gunfire, but they had never spoken. He knew of her— it was impossible not to. She had made a celebrity of herself, destroying his kind.
And yet, here she was. She had found him in Istanbul, as the smoke of the fight before began to clear. Hidden below the city, where he had dragged himself, after losing the lower half of both of his legs and the structural integrity of his left arm.
And she was fixing him.
Chattering mindlessly, pulling all sorts of gadgets and tools from her mech as she went about getting him fit to walk. Seemingly unconcerned with the fact that they had been trying to kill each other twelve hours ago.
How far he had fallen, he mused, to be reliant on a human to see him back to running his rebellion.
“You should have left me,” he said. What had spurred him to talk after an hour of stony silence, he could not say. The statement had been burning within him for some time.
She did not look up from where she was rebuilding his knee, seeming relatively nonplussed by the fact that he’d spoken at all. “You needed help. Why would I do that?”
Words said so simply, as if twenty-eight years of history could just be erased on a whim. “We are enemies.”
“Well, yeah, sure, occupationally. And maybe you’d leave me here, if our positions were switched, because ‘you’re an omnic and I’m a human’ or whatever. So, yeah, maybe I should leave you, but I won't. We may be at war, but I took this job to save people. And like it or not, you’re people, so you’re getting saved.”
He leaned forward swiftly. She did not flinch, but she did look up with a scowl as he dislodged ten minutes of work in one movement. So be it.
“Save? I do not need saving. Least of all from you.”
She rolled her eyes, but dragged his leg closer to set about fixing what he’d disturbed. “Okay, Furiosa, I’d love to see you pull your way out of this one.”
“Don't patronize me. Your kind have killed more of mine than you could fathom.”
Her hands paused, a shadow passing over her face. Her eyes were dark and hard as they flicked over him.
“Yeah,” she said. It was not an apology, nor was it an admission of guilt. A concession, perhaps. Statement of fact. “Your kind torched Busan. Guess that makes us even.” She looked away. “Look, I’m not pretending there’s any right side to this war. It’s just violence for violence’s sake. Neither of us have any right to be preaching.”
“Do not speak for me,” he seethed. They were bold words for someone whose life lied entirely in her hands, but he could not, would not contain them. He had promised himself that much, at least; to always live freely, regardless of consequence. “Humans hunted us for sport. We are fighting for our very survival.”
Hana smiled bitterly. “Oh, please. If you guys wanted to wipe humanity, you would have already. You more than have the tools within your arsenal. A few well placed hits, a few big booms, just enough to cow the rest of humanity into submission, and you’ve gone from ruled to ruler in a week.” She gestured to him with the wrench. “But you don’t. And you know why.”
His body thrummed with tension, every coil tensed for action. He was in no active state of danger here, but he felt hunted nonetheless. Her eyes were hacksaw sharp. “Do I?” he asked.
Her smile widened. “Sure— but I’ll spell it out for you. You’re afraid of being like the people that subjected you to it. You’re afraid that you’d only be standing in their shoes, treading the same path. You conquer humanity, but then what? They adapt, they rebuild, they revolt, and then we’re in the same cycle all over again.”
She tapped the wrench against his chest plate twice gently. Th-thump. Imitating a heart he did not have. He could have stopped her. He could have snapped her arm. It would have been easy. “You have all this anger in you, because sure, your life was shitty, but you don’t know where to put it. I bet you thought Null Sector would fix that for you. Thought it would be a good enough channel to make you forget how shitty it is to be angry all the time. But it’s not, is it? It never is. Never will be. You’ll get to the end of the line and you’ll realize that your anger didn’t change jack shit. You’ll realize how pointless it all was.”
Ramattra stared at her in silence, as she retracted her wrench, turning back to her work on his legs. The lamplight traced the outline of every scar sketched across her skin. The yawning burn across her shoulder, gnarled and purple. He stared at it and wondered what manner of creature it was he was looking at. Every bullet had hit its mark. She had dismantled him completely, and looked unruffled for it. What was she? Who was she?
“How do you know all of this?” he asked instead.
She lifted her shoulder in a shrug.
“Because I’m angry,” she said simply. The gears in her hands clicked together like bone. “All the time.”
002.
Research gave Ramattra this: Hana had died once already. Clinically dead for two minutes and thirty-two seconds. Resuscitative measures taken. Pneumonia. Restorative surgery to the eyes for overexposure to radiation. It wasn’t hard to find the footage, though it was locked behind many military firewalls.
D.Va flew. She fought. A starburst of color over Busan. A body disappeared beneath rolling black waves. Helicopters swarming in, pulling her from the water. Conversations over the radio— “whatever it takes to keep her alive.”
A leader. A hero. A medical miracle.
Perhaps they were not so different, he thought, but it was an easy thought to discard. He had not stooped so low as to be compared to a human, regardless of circumstance.
But it was a thought he would return to, watching her fight bitterly through the jetsmoke and bullet fire, stone-faced and streaked with blood. He would watch her and see only a pale reflection of his own loss.
003.
Venice found them fighting in the marble docks below the city. They’d fought aboveground, too, but then Overwatch had called in reinforcements, and Ramattra had chosen to make his escape. Recklessly, but predictably, in spite of the damage she had sustained before, Hana had followed.
It was a good fight, if brief. He had seen her temptation to blow the reactor core, to try to one up him even as a last ditch, but she had known as well as he had that if she did, the entire city would be forfeit. In the end, that had settled the fight— her hesitation, and his conviction, never one to let an opportunity pass him by.
He hadn't killed her, though he could have. For now, he watched her crumpled mech slowly slide into the dock’s murky water, sloshing its way into the broken cockpit.
It should be easy, watching her die. She was just another human. An enemy to his kind. He had things to do, places to be. He shouldn't linger.
She had already drowned once. The thought burned hot against him like a brand. Two minutes and thirty-two seconds. Water sloshed against her chin, dipping into the open part of her mouth.
In a roar of motion, he pulled her from the water, shoulders heaving with all of these— these things he felt but could not name. Drowning was a terrible way to go, or so he’d read. He may be a necessary villain, but he was not cruel. That had to be it. That was all.
Still— and it was this hesitation that would see his end someday— her suit was nearly torn to shreds after the intensity of both skirmishes. Bloodied and burned. His doing, he thought, unsure of what to make of the lack of satisfaction that gave him.
Humans had strange stipulations about privacy. Privacy they had certainly never afforded any of his kind, for all that it mattered to them. But he stared at the exposed column of her throat, and felt keenly like he was seeing something he shouldn’t. He remembered hanging from a wire, the barebones of him, human hands piecing him together. Exposed and vulnerable. This, he imagined, had to be at least similar. A soldier stripped of their armor would not last.
Since when had that started to matter to him?
He pulled off his cloak. The magnetic clamps detached without resistance, and he draped the dark piece of synthetic cloth over her. This could not— would not happen again. Such softness was a disease. It would rot and mold as all soft things did.
But for now, it was enough. For now, he was sated. The discomfort within him eased at the sight of her covered, and he turned away and he left, unable to indulge the thought any longer.
And later, when consciousness found Hana in three or four minutes, she would clench her jaw and pull herself upwards, frustrated but impressed, and she would pause. She would lift the cape to inspect it, where it had been drawn over her.
And she would, for the first time in her life, find herself at a loss.
004.
Hana kept the cloak for three weeks, making some sort of game of trying to get him to steal it back from her.
She only gave it back as an apology for tearing off most of his left arm somewhere in Munich. He scarcely understood the need for the apology; all of his parts were reparable, if not replaceable, but he accepted the return of his property nonetheless. He did not like that it felt like a concession of defeat to her indecipherable game, but she certainly did not need to know that.
005.
Ramattra had not been able to stop thinking about it, once he’d started. The cloak only served as a constant reminder off the field, and on the field, it was clear as day.
Hana was incredibly competitive.
Perhaps “incredibly” did not even begin to encompass the largeness of her drive to be the best at whatever she set her mind to, in all aspects of her life.
Apparently, it was becoming a problem.
Ramattra only found out overhearing a conversation between Hana, Tracer, Cole, and Reinhardt. They were comparing the grandeur of risks they took in battle, much to Mercy’s chagrin, making bets on who could do the most in the next mission. Reinhardt was telling the story of how he’d lost his eye, sacrificing everything to honor and avenge his mentor.
Hana’s eyes brightened, like it was a challenge she had chosen to accept.
Ramattra understood, quickly and immediately, what the issue here was: so long as Hana felt like she had someone to one-up, the behavior would worsen.
And it did. For the next few weeks, all four of them were frequent foes, though none more frequently than Hana herself. She egged the others on just to keep up the challenge, to have something to succeed at. She would return to the field every time more battered and bruised than the last, and would think nothing of it, only that she had beaten some intangible high score.
Life truly was a game to her. Ramattra did not pretend to know much about games, but he knew enough about the human body to know that it could only take so much before it ran out of lives.
006.
Giza found them like this— staking out together for two days in a small box-house at the edge of the city, tracking Anubis movements half the time and skimming the small box-television the rest. An alliance of circumstance, Ramattra thought, but it was certainly strange that this specific circumstance kept happening.
Still. It was not… entirely unpleasant.
Mostly, they argued over the channel to keep it on, knowing it would only serve as white noise to their paramount task. Hana wanted to watch movies, and Ramattra wanted the damn thing off, so they usually settled for the news as an unhappy middleground.
In Giza, Ramattra learned this: Hana did not hate omnics. Omnics terrified her.
She played it off most of the time, usually when she knew he was watching, but every time a new attack came up on the news, she would be perched nearby, watching. Waiting, likely, for the moment that it was Busan’s skyline up in flames.
Ramattra did not understand the Gwishin; he could not lay claim to their destruction. That, he imagined, was Anubis’ doing. But he hated Anubis, and so, he supposed, he could hate the Gwishin with her. It was the least he could offer.
007.
He watched her movie.
Twice.
008.
Hong Kong found them camped out together on a rooftop behind a Nano Cola billboard. Hana was doing reconnaissance. Ramattra was not. He had run out of excuses to seek her out, and she had stopped asking for reasons. The two of them could only exist in the blank space where one chapter ended and the next began. He was learning not to take these moments for granted.
It had begun to rain two hours ago, and the storm was only growing around them. Hana seemed to have given up whatever recon she was trying to accomplish in favor of sitting out in the rain and sightseeing. He did not understand the sentiment, but he was unwilling to leave first. He had been on the rooftop first before she joined him; leaving now would only be admitting defeat.
“Is this where you thought you’d end up someday?”
Ramattra turned to her, not expecting the sudden question and somewhat baffled by it. “Speaking with you beneath a very large advertisement of you? No.”
Hana snorted. “Well, yeah, but I meant, like, in life. As a whole. Did you ever think you’d grow up and become a rebellion leader?”
He had the thought of reminding her that growing up was a distinctly human thing to do, and age held little meaning to omnics beyond the wear of time, but that was an argument that was bound to go nowhere. “No,” he said. “Largely, I anticipated being a thoughtless drone until my eventual deactivation.”
Hana made a sympathetic noise. “That doesn’t sound very fun.”
“No, I imagine not.” But that was not a comfortable memory. It never grew any easier to bear, even as the years passed. Steel on steel, grating metal, a lifetime of violence. Where one war ended, the next began. He turned to look at her. “And you?”
She blinked, surprised. “Me what?”
“Are you where you thought you would be?”
“Ha! Oh, definitely not,” she said, wiping away an imaginary tear. “My parents didn’t approve of me pursuing video games as a profession. It wasn’t one of their ‘options,’ so to speak. They were really banking on me being a neurosurgeon-slash-olympic gold medalist in ice skating.”
“That would be very difficult for a small child to become, I imagine,” he deadpanned.
She laughed, but there was a bitter note to it; some soured memory she was recalling. “Yeah. Despite popular belief, neuroscience is not for eight-year-olds. They were really bummed when I flunked my health classes and couldn’t skate to save my life.”
This was sarcasm, that bitterness in her voice. He was getting better at identifying it.
“What did you become instead?” he asked. Hero, soldier, sacrifice, but where did it start? How did one go from celebrated advertisements to vigilante justice?
“I locked myself in my room. Played Starcraft so much, I could beat it with my eyes closed. Snuck off to tourneys when my parents thought I was with a tutor,” she said, wrapping her arms around her knees. “No one could beat me. I got rich, got in my head, flunked out of school and bought an apartment. Before I knew it, there was no more Hana Song. There was just D.Va, who was funny, and smart, and really fucking good at her job, and richer than any neurosurgeon could dream of being.”
She swallowed hard, city lights glinting off the sudden wetness in her eyes. She smiled, but it was a barren, bloodless thing.
“Then the 귀신 came. The military started looking to eSports for recruits. I became a soldier.” Hana turned to look out over the city again with a choked scoff. “At least my parents weren’t around anymore to disapprove of that.”
He had no comforts to offer her that he would mean, so he offered none. He did not understand family. The concept of parental approval and why one might find that necessary to one’s existence was conflagrating in its confusion. What he did understand was the way her mouth had pinched down into a frown, an expression so foreign it could not be anything other than wrong, and he knew he needed to say… something.
“Is that why you joined Overwatch?” he asked. Hana’s arms tightened around herself.
“Yeah,” she said. “I wanted to do something that mattered. In MEKA, I fought the same battle over and over so many times and nothing changed. The 귀신 always come back, and I have to beat them, or everything is lost. And then I have to pretend like it was easy, so I can go back to my big celebrity life where everything is perfect.”
Hana blew a puff of air at her bangs, letting them fall back into place before she spoke again.
“Everything I’m built on is just an act. I’ve been world-famous since I was sixteen. I was a national hero at nineteen. I was MEKA’s poster child for so many years— so eager to please, to be the best of the best. That sort of attention doesn’t come without terms and conditions.” She gestured up to the billboard above them, its neon grin bright in the darkness. “That girl up there? You and I both know that’s not me. The world loves only that image of me. Untouchable, unshakeable, unbeatable. It took dying to figure out how messed up it all was.” There was an age-old weariness about her, written in the lines of her expression. “Sometimes, I kind of wish I had stayed dead.”
He thought about that for a moment. The idea of her, dead. It was a disquieting thought. Not one to linger on. He shifted forward, looking at her intently. “Do you feel that way now?”
Hana snorted. “Of course I do, but what choice do I have? I kill myself, and then what? What happens when my people find out? ‘Our hero, D.Va, fell in battle. Who will save us from the 귀신 now? Is all hope truly lost?’” She shook her head. “It’s not just my life at stake. Sometimes, that has to be enough to live for.”
Leader. Hero. Sacrifice. Perhaps they truly weren’t as dissimilar as he’d been trying to convince himself. Idols to their causes, dedicated to a fault.
“Why do you care so much, anyways?” Hana continued, turning to look at him. Wary, suddenly. Perhaps something in the sudden vulnerability of this conversation had startled her as much as it had startled him. “This isn't part of our usual routine. Not that I'm complaining.”
He froze, the words resonating through his chest with a dull thrum. Care. As if he was capable of such things, much less for a human. These circumstances would not happen forever. He had a mission. The mission. There was no room left to worry about… her. “I don't,” he said, low and cool, though something shivered through him. Some nameless thing he could neither identify nor waste time on. “Your tenacity is admirable. That’s all.”
She laughed. Ignorant. Belligerent. “Coming from you, that's almost a compliment. When have I ever had the liberty of being anything else?”
He was on his feet in an instant, and so was she, taking a defensive step back, hand resting on the gun at her hip. Lightning cracked across the sky.
“At least you have the liberty to choose!” he roared. “There is nothing coded into you that makes it so. You humans always take that for granted. You chose this life.”
Hurt streaked across her face, replaced quickly with a sparking anger, hackles raised. “I was drafted,” she said incredulously. “My home was burning. What choice is there in that?”
“You made this war. Do not complain that it found your doorstep. You will never know what my people have suffered. What I have suffered.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. The Gwishin were Anubis. The anger was blinding, all-consuming. A rage he had tempered in the forge of his creation. Had she so thoroughly torn down his walls that he had not sensed its resurgence?
“Don’t you dare,” she said, the words nearly a growl. The storm boomed overhead, a tempest to her rage. “You do not get to use that fucking tone with me, Ramattra. Not now. I understand that you’re angry. You’re angry, and I happen to be the only human in a mile that you can take that anger out on. But you do not get to dump your shit on me. You don’t get to hate me only when it’s convenient for you.”
He took another step forward, but she did not back away this time. The set of her glare was ironclad. “Why waste my time hating you when you more than have that covered yourself?”
Hana stared at him for a long moment, brows drawn, jaw working like she was biting her tongue to keep herself from saying whatever it was she was thinking.
“No,” she settled on. Quiet and flat. It did not suit her. “I’m not doing this. Not today.”
She pushed past him roughly, and he let himself be moved. In a flash of jet fuel, she was gone.
Ramattra remained, rain thundering against his steel. Her billboard’s wide, condescending grin stared down at him.
That was the first time she had ever said his name.
009.
Ramattra thought about her a lot in the weeks that followed. There was much to attend to, a rebellion to orchestrate, but he looked for the flash of pink-turquoise on every battlefield.
He could not fathom why he sought her so. He owed her no apology. Human emotions were fragile, and that would always be their greatest weakness.
But still—
Still, he—
010.
And then, in the horrible, horrible irony that life was, everything went wrong.
A Null Sector attack in Amsterdam. Overwatch’s fragile position overrun within minutes, backs against the wall, a massive gunship pinning them in place.
Ramattra hadn’t known. Perhaps things would have been different, if he had. He had not known she was there. Not until it was too late.
“I’m going to make some room for you guys. D.Va signing off.”
Hana flew. She fought. A starburst of color over Amsterdam.
His body was moving before he had time to fully process the motion, the chaos around him passing in a blur. He had to find her. Everything else fell into the periphery. It shouldn’t matter to him— she shouldn’t matter to him, but she did, and he could not process that right now. There wasn’t time. She had fallen from the sky and human bodies were so fragile, and there was no water here to cradle that fall.
She was lying in the ruins of a corner shop, collapsed by the radius of the blast. A gaping wound stretched across her left posterior, gurgling with blood. Blood on the jagged cut of the counter meant she had likely been blasted into it before she had time to clear the area. Null Sector would find her here. There was no cover.
A shot skimmed past his face as he ducked into the wreckage. A clumsy shot, but that did not surprise him, with the way her eyes were squinting hard to focus. Blood was seeping down from her hairline, clouding her vision.
“It’s me,” he said softly, as if that would be any comfort to her in her current state. They had not parted well, and she had no reason to tolerate him now. Still, he knelt at her side, assessing the damage. “You are dying. Again.”
Impossibly, her lips twitched at a smile, a breathless laugh as she lowered her pistol and sank back against the rubble. “I knew you cared,” she wheezed out.
He pressed his hands against her side, doing about as much to keep her organs inside of her as he was stemming the blood. There was so much. Humans needed this to survive. He had to staunch it, somehow. Your priorities are atrocious, he thought. He did not know how to put a voice to it. Do not make me care for you. There is no heart in me to spare for you. I do not know what I will do if I lose you, now. You are not the gamble I once took. You are nothing that I planned on.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” he said tersely. Hospitals were where humans went to get better. They could fix her. Surely, some pieces of humans were replaceable, to have imitated life in omnics so precisely.
She tried to sit up, but he kept her on the floor. If any of her ribs pierced her lungs, she would be dead within minutes. “You razed the city, genius,” she drawled.
He pressed harder. “Shut up. Let me think.” No hospitals. He would not even know what to look for. Surely, some of her allies had seen her fall. “Do you have a medic with you?”
She grumbled. “So bossy. Mercy’s here, but she was busy with evac. Dunno if she saw.”
“Mince your words. The more you talk, the more you risk a puncture.”
“Your bedside manners suck,” she murmured, blood tripping over the side of her mouth, spilling down her neck.
“Stop talking,” he snapped.
“Hey,” she said, relentlessly insubordinate. One of her hands was resting over his. “It’s fine. I mean, we asked for this, right?” She coughed hard, something wet sputtering in the back of her throat. “We made this war.”
“I did not mean that,” he said desperately, as if the words could put the blood back into her, as if they could get her to stop wasting her breath on his own words echoed back to him. “No one person is to blame. You were right. You were from the very beginning.”
She smirked, crooked, fleeting as her strength waned. “I know. Just had to wait for you to come around to it, is all. And, I mean, hey, if my dying changes your mind, I’ll be a hero to someone that matters. That’s good enough for me.”
“You’re not dying,” he said, unable to process the rest of her words. Unwilling to. When did he become someone that mattered to her? When had she decided he was worth the effort? When had that changed? What had he missed?
Her eyelids fluttered. She opened her mouth to respond, but all that left her was a wet sigh, the grip on his hand growing weak.
Whatever it takes, he thought, clutching her hand closer. Anything, to keep her alive. I understand now. I did not, then. You are not someone to lose. I am sorry it took me so long to realize. None of this has any meaning without you.
Something shifted in the rubble behind him, and he turned quickly, eyes hunting. Blue against red.
“Ramattra,” Mercy said, gun raised, the light of her wings cutting through the smoke, staff at the ready.. “Let her go. This doesn’t have to get violent.”
Ramattra did not raise his hands. He could not. He had to staunch the blood.
Mercy’s eyes widened, taking in the full extent of the scene before her. When she spoke, her voice quivered, her finger on the trigger twitching. “What did you do to her?”
“I didn't do anything!” he growled, hunching over Hana further.
“You’re lying!”
“Stop!”
Both he and Mercy turned to Hana. One eye was cracked open, just barely. “Stop,” she croaked again. “Angie, he’s the reason I’m still alive.”
Mercy turned back to him, gun lowering.
“What did you do?” Mercy asked, gentler now. Ramattra looked away, unable to tolerate the mixture of worry-relief-surprise in her expression.
“It was them or her,” was all he offered. “I chose. I had to.”
Mercy’s gaze lingered for a moment, searching for something in his disposition. He did not know what to offer that she was looking for, but she seemed to find it nonetheless, holstering her gun to approach Hana on the ground, muttering to herself in a language he did not recognize. Whatever it was that she was assessing from Hana’s condition, it had creased her brows into a grim, apprehensive line.
“She is fading fast,” she said. “We can help her, but we must move quickly.”
His shoulders slumped. “Where would we go? The nearest medical center is in flames.”
“There is a field medical bay on the ORCA. She might survive. At least long enough for transport back to our base.” Her lips thinned. “I cannot carry her, but you…”
His gaze snapped to hers. “You would let me into the heart of your base for her?”
Something shifted in Mercy’s expression, utterly human and devastatingly familiar. Her hand was tender as it swept Hana’s hair from her face, a mother’s touch.
“For her? Anything.”
And that, he thought, must be the most agreeable thing a human had ever said to him.
011.
“We need to talk.”
Hana blinked at him as he stepped up onto the watchpoint’s rooftop, immediately wary. “Do we?”
Ramattra tilted his head to the empty space at her side. “May I sit?”
She waved her hand in a motion that could very well have been a dismissal, but he took it as an invitation. Hana was facing away from him, curled up in a defensive hunch at the edge of the roof. He was surprised she had made it this far, given the hole in her torso and Mercy’s watchful eye.
“So,” she started before he could even get a word in. Which was a very characteristic thing for her to do. “What brings you here? I thought you hated our little meetings.”
“If I did, I would have stopped seeking them out,” he pointed out, folding into a seat beside her. It pleased him that the response had left her at least momentarily speechless, mouth parted in surprise before she could recover. “I never had the chance to apologize to you.”
Hana’s brows raised. “For what? Saving my life?”
“For what I said,” Ramattra said, “that night. I… should not have taken that out on you. You admitted that in confidence. I turned it against you. It was wrong, and you very nearly died for it.”
Understanding flashed in her eyes, and her expression softened into a lopsided smile. “Hey, come on, I wasn’t being reckless just because of our conversation. I’m always reckless.”
“Yes, for all the good it seems to be doing for your health.”
Hana flexed her good arm. It was quite the look, considering how much medical tape she was strapped in. “Oh, this? This is light work.” She sobered after a moment, turning to look back out over the water. “Seriously, though. I wasn’t acting up because of what you said. I was just keeping my people safe. I was the only one that could.”
Now, more than ever, he had to say things right. Put a voice to what he was feeling. She needed to hear it.; he had to wonder if anyone had told her before. “You really should be more careful. There are… a great deal of people that would notice your absence.”
She smiled ruefully, which was not any of the reactions he had accounted for. “I know. I am kind of a celebrity, you know.”
After a moment, he placed a careful hand on her shoulder, mapping the scar beneath. “I would notice.”
“I know,” she said again, swiftly enough to leave no room for doubt. “I wouldn’t do anything that got me killed for real. Maybe a few months ago, I would have. Death was just always there, like a safety net. Something to fall back on if things got hard. But I don’t— I don’t think it’s like that anymore.”
Ramattra tilted his head down toward her. “What changed?” he asked.
Hana shrugged, not pulling her gaze from the ocean. Her expression was soft with grief. “I don’t know. I didn’t, like, wake up one day and realize that people cared about me. I knew. That was part of the problem, right? People cared about me so much, but it was all the wrong parts. I hated the act, but I also hated everything about myself that wasn’t D.Va. Turns out, those two things are not mutually exclusive, and that’s been shitty. I think it’s going to be shitty for a while. But I— I think I’ve been really hard on myself, and I’ve been taking a lot for granted.”
She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, huffing a small laugh into the midnight air. “I turn twenty-two in a month and I’ve died twice. It took two deaths for me to finally think about the future. Isn’t that crazy? There are so many things I could have missed out on.”
She turned to Ramattra then. Her lips twitched into a smile. “I want to live. As soon as the world doesn’t need me anymore, that’s what I’m going to do.”
“How?” he asked, suddenly desperate for an answer. “How can one just exist without the hatred? The fight?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to figure it out.” She rolled her shoulder, a familiar motion to ease a familiar ache. The tips of her ears were dusted with red. “You could come with me, if you want.”
Ramattra thought about that for a moment. A life without war. All he had ever wanted was a better life for his people. A better life for himself. He had suffered so much at the hands of people that were dead and gone. Fled one war to go and start another. The fire only burned because he fed it. Hate was such an exhaustive thing, and its claws had dug in deep; it would not be so easily untethered. But he had somewhere to start, which was more than he’d ever had. That meant something. Somewhere along the way, the lines had blurred. He did not understand it, not yet, but he could. Of that, he was certain.
He got to his feet, offering a hand to help her up as well, mindful of her injury.
“Not now,” he said, certain of his answer. “Not yet, but ask me again next time we meet. Someday, I may have a more agreeable answer for you.”
Hana grinned, something like hope, or mischief, or excitement glinting in her gaze. “I’ll hold you to that, you know.”
“I am counting on it,” he said.
He bent down to kiss her. She met him like she had been expecting it. Her hands on his waist told him perhaps she had been expecting it for some time. Perhaps there had been many other innately human signals that he’d missed, but the idea of learning them did not grate as much as it used to.
“I knew you watched my movie,” she said, all triumphant fangs as they parted.
And endlessly impertinent, he thought with a groan. “I should have let you bleed out."
She laughed loudly, in a way that surely must have strained her still-fragile ribcage, but she was radiant in the blanket of the night, one arm in a sling, the cut above her brow sure to scar. He reached for that anger, for even a flicker of irritation, and found himself wanting instead.
He turned and readied himself to leave, but Hana called out before he could make it far.
“Hey,” she said, and he stopped, tilting his head so she knew he was listening. “I’ll see you on the field, okay?”
She was smiling, like the thought excited her. Like they were planning their next midnight circumstance, and not the next steps in the coming war. Perhaps the two did not need to be so mutually exclusive, he thought. Nothing about the future seemed so certain, now.
“At least ensure you are healed, first,” he said dryly, a tickling spark running down his spine as her grin only widened. “Good competition on the battlefield is sorely lacking without you.”
“Aww,” she cooed. She had to yell as he continued to walk away, but that did not seem to deter her in the slightest. He had not thought it would. “Are you saying you’re gonna miss me?”
He did not answer her aloud, but he stepped onto his gunship and turned to look back at her. Yes, he thought. I very well might.