Mordax et al

seananmcguire:

keyofjetwolf:

seananmcguire:

keyofjetwolf:

seananmcguire:

keyofjetwolf:

Here’s the sad truth: I know fuck all about the Overwatch backstory. everthing I know about Overwatch beyond playint the game is filtered Throgh Holligay’s ‘fics. I actually don’t know anytihng about the Omnic war, like ROBOTS ARE BAD BUT MABYTE NOT and that’s about as far as I can take it.

BUT LET PHARAH BE MAD AT HER MUM THAT’S SEROIUSLY WHAT I WANT MOST OUT OF BACKSTORY RIGHT NOW HOLY FUCKING SHIT I GET SO PISSED  ABOUT THIS

The Omnics were devastating most of…well, most of everywhere, honestly, and they were building giant robots to fight them in Korea (because robots that couldn’t think fighting robots that could think absolutely wasn’t going to cause more problems, absolutely wasn’t going to seem like…like riding the corpses of their own loved ones into battle against them, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, no matter what Ami said, no matter what Setsuna implied, it wasn’t they were going to make this better), and Australia was just gone, and maybe that should have hurt more, but it wasn’t like Australia had ever felt like a real place anyway, and…

And Usagi looked at the empty air in front of her heart where the ginzuishou

wasn’t, and told herself over and over that it wasn’t as bad as people kept saying it was, because if it was that bad, if it was that bad, surely she would have received a sign, a something, a new candy-colored focus for her power.  Surely she would have been able to protect her world.

Surely.  Because if this was as bad as everyone said, it would have to be the birth of the Silver Millennium, and that–

The Omnic strike on Tokyo would later be viewed by some as one of the turning points of the war.  The Omnics had been expecting victory.  They had been expecting resistance, in the form of Overwatch teams.  They had been expecting screams.

They had not been expecting a shock wave which threw half the population outside the city while encasing the remaining citizens in blinding silver light.  They had not been expecting the crystal shell which formed immediately in wake of the blinding brilliance, trapping more than half their troops in a substance too strong to shatter.

They had not been expecting the blue-haired girl in the tattered uniform of an urban legend, a Tokyo myth, to stagger into Overwatch headquarters a week later with an impossible computer in her hand, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

They had not been expecting her to have cracked the seed of their driving A.I., or for her vengeance and brilliance to have carried her through so many viruses in such a short time.  She would never go into the field, would never stop trying to crack the shell that enclosed her lost city, but there were those who looked at the skills of certain hackers and saw her steady, surprisingly mischievous hand.

They had not been expecting the black-haired girl in the robes of a priestess, surrounded by her army of avenging crows, to descend on them like the fires of Hell and Heaven combined.  They had not expected the fury of a heart broken and held together only by hope.  It had never been in their programming.  They could never have seen her coming.

They had not been expecting the brown-haired girl who called down lightning, or the aqua-haired girl who swung the sea like a sword, took back the coastlines and held them, held them so long, held them until her golden girl of a partner could lift the wind and make of it a blade to slice through the throat of the world.  They had not been expecting the tiny one with the unflinching eyes and the polearm that opened armor like foil, or the woman who stopped time itself, who looked at the testing of an experimental plane, and wept, and walked away.

Most of all, they had not been expecting the golden-haired girl in the orange uniform, the one who tied her hair into high ponytails and screamed at the sky every night, who flung light like ribbons, who condemned the heavens as if the Moon had personally done her wrong.

“You were supposed to take us with you!” she would howl, and cut down battalions.

Later, it would be agreed that the end of the Crisis began when they made a target out of Tokyo.  And none save the girls no one had expected would know that really, it began with a golden-haired girl frozen in the moment that her pajamas unraveled into ribbons, with her outstretched hands still cupping a silver crystal, waiting for centuries to go by, waiting for the thaw.

FIRST OF ALL HOW DARE YOU NOW I’M SOBER ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT THIS SAYS

SECOND OF ALL HOW DARE YOU FILL IN ALL THESE GAPS IN MY KNOWLEDGE WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL PAIN

THIRD OF ALL HOW DARE YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE TO STAB ME THIS IS UNFAIR AND I PROTEST IN THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY TERMS

FOURTH OF ALL HOW DARE YOU

Sunlight glittered off the crystal shell encasing all of Tokyo, filling the air with rainbows.  It was beautiful.  It was magical.  It was a closed and sparkling tomb, holding everyone not thrown outside the city limits in eternal silent peace.

Tourists came to Tokyo to take pictures, and some of them were solemn and thoughtful, understanding the magnitude of what had happened here.  They might not understand the cause of the Shell–no one did, not even the scientists of the former Overwatch organization, who had been studying it since the first Omnic Crisis ground to its halt–but they knew that it was the grave of millions.  They came to pay respects and weep for family lost behind that beautiful, irrevocably closed dome.  They left offerings at the base of the Shell: flowers and stuffed toys and family photographs, food and money and sticks of incense.  It seemed, to them, the least that they could do for the sacrifice that had turned the war around.

Others came laughing, unable to respect the dead in the face of their own relief.  They had lived.  They had walked into a battlefield they had never asked for, and they had come out the other side.  They kept to themselves, mostly, not wanting to intrude upon the grief of others, and their joy had no teeth, no agenda: only hope that the future would be better.

They were better than the ones who only came to take pictures of themselves against a sky of living rainbows, the ones who looked at Tokyo and saw a tourist attraction, and not a burial ground.

The girl–the woman–the girl in the orange and white jumpsuit sat in one of the many dips that studded the Shell’s surface, concealed from the eyes of all three kinds of tourist, and took another swig from the bottle of wine in her hand.  She looked sixteen.  She had looked sixteen for over a decade.  She would look sixteen for centuries, she knew, until the sky changed and the world moved on and the Shell melted away and wasn’t that just like a Serenity?  Wasn’t that just like a Queen?  "You were supposed to take us with you,“ she muttered, the words as much curse as mantra, and looked at the wine in her hand like she didn’t know what it was, or where it had come from.  Like it, too, was a lie.

“Which anniversary is this?” asked a voice, calm, always calm, like the surface of an untroubled sea.  "A broken fingernail?  A forgotten homework assignment?  I have never met anyone as determined to drown themselves in the shallow shoals of memory, and I lived with Setsuna for longer than I care to contemplate.  She stood idly by while Hotaru put bubble bath in my saltwater spa once.“

Minako could hear, if not see, Michiru’s delicate, offended shudder.  She shook her head.  She took another drink.

“It’s not a conversation if you refuse to answer me.  It’s a lecture.  If we had wanted to lecture you, we would have fished Rei out of whatever burning pit she’s thrown herself into this week.”

“She apologized to me.”

“Rei?”

“No.”  Minako finally turned, finally looked, and there was Michiru, lucky enough to have been a woman already when Princess Serenity (damn her) stopped the war and stopped their clocks, leaving them all terrified to return to their civilian forms, terrified of time.  If they aged, if they grew up and grew old and went the way of all flesh, what would happen to her when time remembered she existed?  They still loved her too much to condemn her to walk the endless halls of Crystal Tokyo without them.  "Usagi.“

Michiru cocked an eyebrow and waited.  She stood at the edge of the dip, where the bright sunlight cascading off the crystal would keep her from being seen.  Her uniform–tight aquamarine pants, a white shirt, a sailor’s long coat–was vaguely maritime, cut to allow her to move, to run, to never lose her balance.  "Usagi?  What had she done?”

“Remembered herself.”  Minako’s laugh was a wounded creature lodged in her throat.  "She said…she said I had done more as our princess when it was a lie than she thought she could ever do as the truth, and she knew I’d had a little extra strength before she was called.  She knew the silver crystal had been able to feed me enough to make the lie believable.  So she apologized, because she never meant for her becoming more to make me less.“

That day, oh sweet stars, that day, Usagi in tears and Minako crying alongside her, the princess and the captain of the guard, the girl who forgot and the girl who remembered, and loyalty had been sealed like a city in a crystal dome over so much less.

Michiru was silent for a time.  Minako found herself wondering whether the woman had finally run out of pithy comments and careful barbs.  That would be a miracle and a half.  Finally, she sighed.

“You need to stop this.”

“Stop what?”

“The dwelling.  The drinking.  All of it.  There’s work to be done.”

“I guard the grave of my once and future princess,” said Minako mockingly.  "The war is over, Michiru.  We won.  Let me do as I like.“

"Another war is brewing.  As you would know, if you had been listening.  The Omnics are stirring.  Talon is on the move.  They made a try for Doomfist’s glove last week.  Winston and Ami are concerned.”

Minako frowned.  "How concerned?“

"Concerned enough that there’s talk of a recall.  Of reactivating the Overwatch program.”

Minako’s frown became a stare.

Overwatch had been doing fine before the remains of what had always been dismissed as a Tokyo urban legend had been dropped on their doorstep.  But they hadn’t been fools.  Given the chance to snatch up nine super-powered new recruits–eight, if they didn’t count Ami, who had already been insisting that she would never fight again–they had taken it.

New uniforms.  New names.  New injuries.  And if Rei couldn’t work with Mercy because the image of a golden-haired woman with wings soaring toward her, hand outstretched, had been too much to handle, well.  There were always other teams.  Inferno had become a common participant on Blackwatch missions, impressing even Reyes with her viciousness.  Makoto and Zarya had proven to be a terrifying pair, especially given Mako’s immunity to electrical shock, and Kaminari had quickly become a common sight on any mission that involved search and rescue or protecting civilians.

Maelstrom and Gale had only ever been willing to work together.  Watching Morrison try to order them on separate strike teams would have been funny, if he hadn’t been so passionate about the idea that one day, he would be able to convince them to listen.  He never had.  Overwatch had been broken and scattered without them ever letting one another out of eyesight, and sometimes it was easy to believe that it had been right to let the dream die, if the head dreamer couldn’t see that even the most stoic, the most unruffled of them was slowly bleeding to death from a slice across the soul.

Hotaru hadn’t been allowed to join Overwatch.  Too young, they said, as if they weren’t drowning in a tide of teenagers, as if half of them hadn’t stopped their own clocks long before they’d be allowed to legally drink.  Firefly had become an independent agent, and the last time Minako had heard her mentioned, it had been in conjunction with Talon, and the less asked about that, the better.

“Ever miss the youma?” she asked, and laughed, bitter and bereft.

“I disagree with this decision, but I’ve been outvoted.  Even Haruka sided against me.”  Michiru’s tone promised punishment, for that.  "There’s going to be a recall.  They’re going to ask us all to come back to active duty.“

Silence.

"We’ve decided not to go without you.”

Minako–Sailor Venus, only one of them to fight with her own name wrapped around her like a shield, like she couldn’t be anything other than Venus, Venus, captain of the guard, Venus, Venus, condemned to remember, condemned to burn–whipped her head around and stared.

Michiru looked calmly back.  "If Overwatch needs us, they need all of us.  And if you, our sole remaining leader, disagree with their need, then clearly it can’t be that pressing, no?  I’m enjoying Paris.  The streets sing.  I understand Rei has found a nice temple to brood in.  Everyone has their place.  If we’re to leave them, it has to be on the orders of our commander.“

"I–”

“Who, naturally, will not be a drinkard thinking only of herself.”

“Ah.”  Minako looked at the bottle.  The bottle, which had never offered forgetfulness; only a shallow, momentary peace.

Battle was better.  She couldn’t let herself age and die while Usagi waited, but Mercy had been too late before, ne?  Mercy had failed Gabriel.  Mercy could fail any one of them.  An honest warrior’s death was nothing she could be blamed for.  It never had been.

How far back through time could the silver crystal reach?

“Let’s find out,” muttered Minako, and stood.

Michiru raised an eyebrow.

Minako–Venus–smiled, and the feral warrior whose light and laughter and calculated disregard for her own safety had led Blackwatch to a hundred victories was there, was back, wreathed in the rainbow shroud of an entombed city.

“Come on,” she said.  She dropped the bottle.  It shattered, and its shards were nothing but specks against the crystal that was Tokyo, the incubator of Crystal Tokyo yet to be.

Michiru did not step away from that stance, that smile, and she rather thought that should have been rewarded.

“Let’s go remind the world that love hurts,” said Venus, and no one was standing on the dome, no one was there except the rainbows.

Me: SEANAN THAT HURT

Seanan: What’s that? More? OKAY

This beautiful and painful and beautiful and hurts me and is full of pain and beauty. Ugh, all the integration and splintering. I SHOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO VISIT THIS WORLD AGAIN I THINK AND FOR THAT I PARTICULARLY CURSE YOU

More, I can do.

Forward or back?  And if back, Lunar Colony meltdown with Amy and Winston, or Oh Honey Haruka Is Everyone’s First Crush, But I Will Cut You with Tracer and Michiru?