Work Text:
In his mind, he sees it as it was:
The day had dawned bright, in defiance of the monsoon season, the sun glimmering on Suravasa’s gilt domes, slanting down its high turquoise walls shimmering on its flowing waters. Zenyatta emerged from rest state as its warmth caressed his photovoltaic panels, stirring him to wakefulness and the day’s tasks. His siblings, both Omnic and human, greeted him as he glided through the halls to the garden, where he aided the tending, and to the kitchen, where he assisted in the preparation of the day’s meals, precisely slicing vegetables and monitoring the temperature of the ovens being well within his skills. In the early afternoon, he taught a novitiate class and, by the late afternoon, his own defined duties were finished until later in the evening and so he repaired to his favorite of the monastery’s meditation courts, one that looked out over the lotus garden ponds.
He could not smell their perfume, not in the fashion that the human siblings could, nor could he enjoy the cool of the breeze or the shade of the columns as the sun began its fall to the west. But he could take pleasure in the knowledge of their existence and the soothing beauty of the place, as he slipped into the lightest of his meditative states, touching the monastery’s internal networks and allowing his consciousness to spread through them and into them, and outward through there. His Omnic siblings’ minds touched and greeted his own, and he touched and greeted them, as well, and then he flowed on, out into the world beyond the bounds of their serene oasis and into Roshani, across the river. The Vishkar network greeted him coolly, without welcome, and he offered it peace in return, passing by without hostility and communed with the many smaller networks surrounding and feeding into it, allowing his consciousness to expand, unthinking, perceiving, until --
He slammed back into his body, disoriented and reeling, as his consciousness was suddenly and forcefully ejected from its meditative state and back into the merely physical.
In the distance, he heard a cry of surprise and dismay -- and, even worse, cries of pain and outrage, running footsteps, the drum of boots not the quieter sound of sandals on stone. Across the garden pond, on the far portico, a stream of siblings were being forced through the door by armed and armored assailants, their weapons leveled and ready. One of them cried out at him to run and received a sharp blow to the head from the butt of a rifle for her defiance.
“That would be a bad idea, I’m afraid.” The voice was close, too close, and he had not heard its owner’s approach -- though he forgave himself for the lapse as she blinked into visibility, the deresolution of her stealth field exposing her, and he understood how he had been forced back to his body. Genji had told him of her, on his last visit: the Talon operative Sombra, a woman whose skills any network, and any Omnic, should fear. “Let’s not do anything rash and no one needs to be hurt.”
“I…shall not behave rashly, I assure you.” Zenyatta probed gently, found his systems fully isolated, and desisted. “What do you want?”
The sharp click of bootheels on the flagstones answered him, and a chill slid through his systems, as Sombra’s companion stepped into view, reached up, and activated her communication device. “We’ve found him. Prepare for extraction.”
A control team rushed in and surrounded him, inserted restraints into his cerebrospinal column, latched his fully paralyzed body into a hover gurney, and loaded him into an air transport. Sombra, perhaps mercifully, penetrated his systems and force-activated his rest state shortly thereafter.
He was permitted to wake again only after they reached their final destination: the prison he presently occupied, a cell intended for a human occupant, containing as it did a bed, on which his inert body was propped, surrounded by his equally inert orbs. In the depths of his being, he could sense the Iris -- he could always sense it, no matter how near or far he was in relation to Shambali -- but nothing else, his sensory network sharply limited, his external connectivity nonexistent.
Except his bond to the Iris, to which he could not, dared not touch. Not here, not in the place.
The door to his cell chimed -- the locks flicking from red to green for the first time since his arrival, and that portal slid open, the lights flickering on as it did so. Zenyatta knew the man who strode inside, the door closing at his back, for the imposing figure he cut and the fear he had spread in his wake:
Doomfist.
***
In his mind, the Omnium sang.
Not like the Iris -- nothing else in the world sang quite like the Iris, and he felt, he feared, that nothing ever would. No, the song of the Omnium was the hum of the electricity in its thousands of miles of wiring, the almost subliminal rumble of perfectly lubricated machinery, the gentle ring of metallic footsteps on metallic floors as the newly-functional Null Sector units it produced took position in their charging and education cradles, waiting for the time when they might fulfill their intended purpose, while others tended to the needs of…
Their prisoners? Guests? Abductees? Fellow Omnics?
No, that was…not what they were, and Ramattra stirred from his already disintegrating meditative state. Even in the deepest of his contemplations, the fiercest of his clutching at straws, could he force himself to call the things being built here ‘fellow Omnics.’ Oh, in resemblance they were, in form and in some cases function, but that was where the similarities ended -- would always end, he feared, no matter what hopes he might cherish in his innermost core. These…things, these creatures, were machines without life, without being , potential unrealized and potentially unrealizable.
Which was why, in fact, he had ordered each of more humanoid units to attend the…guests, the Omnics in their hibernation modules, sleeping the sleep of the safe and protected, in the heavily shielded, bomb-proof shelters below. At some level, he knew that choice, that order, was absolute folly. The Null Sector warrior-creations of this Omnium could no more learn to become sapient through mere observation than any of the rest of them had, during their long years of durance under the yoke of humankind. That had required something, a spark never before or since achieved, a unique creation, and no amount of hope or desperation on his part would change that.
The urge to sigh was a uniquely human thing, a gesture that encompassed the expression of many possible emotions. As a general rule, Ramattra did not indulge in human emotives but he felt, to the core of his being, the desire to sigh and could not quite bring himself to despise it. He rose from his meditative position, rotated a bit more lubricant into his joints, and stepped out into the hall, the door of his quarters soundlessly sliding aside at his approach and closing at his back. It required three long strides to reach the control center overlooking the Omnium’s main production floor, where a dozen automated lines manufactured replacements for the Null Sector units expended in battle. The majority focused on the newest variants, plans passed to him by his allies : the Wargod, the Sharpshooter, the Blademaster, the Warhead, the Sentry, units that had come with more than just physical designs but also prototypes for their neural networks, advanced forms of artificial intelligence based on human neural scans, the patterns of their thoughts, skills, experience, and meant to replicate those things in Omnic form.
He could not argue against the practical value of such an approach. Humans had spent the majority of their existence as a species perfecting the arts of violence against themselves and other creatures. Borrowing even a fraction of that knowledge to aid in the preservation of Omnickind could only be defined as rational , perhaps even just.
But it did not feel right .
It felt, in fact, like an attempt to sidestep the willing sacrifice that Aurora had made to gift her Omnic siblings with sapience, and an involuntary one at that.
It felt, and he struggled in the core of his being with the admission, nearly like violation .
And it was that he could not bring himself to abide, to come to peace with, no matter how much he tried, how much he attempted to justify it to himself as for the good of his people, for the sake of their survival beyond a single tattered generation. These creatures, these units, were neither human nor Omnic but an unnatural blend of the two and, Iris help him, he could not refuse the use of them, not without severing his alliance with Talon, not without rejecting the use of this place, as either a production facility or as a safe haven. He had chosen his course and now he must follow it.
But what he desired to do, more than anything else, was to lay his head in Zenyatta’s lap, to spill out his fears, his cares, his concerns, and receive from him wisdom, counsel, comfort without judgment. Desired it almost more than he desired the reawakening of his people and their continuance, and knew both were equally far beyond him.
To his vast personal annoyance, Ramattra sighed.
***
“I wish to apologize for the manner of your…invitation to join us.” Akande Ogundimu had a voice that commanded attention and, even with the Doomfist itself detached and replaced with a smaller cybernetic prosthesis, the physical presence that easily expanded to fill whatever room he occupied. He moved with a lithe, almost feline grace and power and settled himself in the only other piece of furniture in the cell, a chair only barely large enough to contain his frame.
“Your apology is accepted,” Zenyatta replied dryly. “Though I suspect it does not come in concert with a restoration of my physical liberty.”
Doomfist chuckled, a low, genuinely amused sound. “It does not, I regret to say. I fear that we cannot trust you that much, yet.”
The ‘yet’ sent a frisson of unease through Zenyatta’s being -- it felt, and sounded, ominous by its very nature. “I would ask, then, why have you brought me here?”
“We have…coinciding interests, Tekhartha.” A smile flashed across his face, bright as a stroke of lightning. “We do not have to be enemies, you and I -- nor the Shambali with Talon. In truth, I believe that we may be of great help to one another.”
“That seems unlikely to me.” Zenyatta replied, carefully. “Unless you are confessing to me the desire to abandon the life of an internationally wanted terrorist and committing your organization to the task of repairing the harm it has done.”
He had the satisfaction, brief though it might be, of seeing Doomfist look genuinely nonplussed. “That is…not what I am saying, no.” Dryly. “And to think I had once considered you incapable of such finely honed…but I digress. No, Tekhartha. What I am suggesting is this: you extend to us your assistance in accessing and analyzing the core of the Shambali mainframe -- and, in return, we shall extend to you our assistance in recreating its more…unique structures and functions.”
“Aurora. You wish to examine Aurora. ” Zenyatta could not quite keep either the horror or the outrage from his voice. “You want the Iris.”
“I wish to extend the hand of fellowship to Omnickind.” Doomfist replied smoothly. “Had she lived, Dr. Liao might have been able to reproduce the events that led to Aurora’s sapience, to the extension of sapience to all Omnics. She did not…and thus, other means are required to continue her work. Surely you do not wish your people to end , when there is so much more you might offer to our shared world?”
“No. But I desire even less to shackle my people to an organization that sows chaos and reaps destruction.” Not for the first time in his existence, Zenyatta lamented the serene immobility of his face, the inability to properly express moral outrage at a repugnant suggestion. “No. I will not help you.”
Doomfist’s own face was still. “So be it. I regret, Tekhartha, what must come as a result of this.”
At his gesture, the door of the cell hissed open and he withdrew -- but Zenyatta was not alone for long.
***
Zenyatta did not reside in Shambali -- had not for quite some time. His intellect had always been questing, his spirit fundamentally mendicant, and in both he had found enlightenment, if not precisely peace. Ramattra had respected that, if not all the decisions he made as a result of it, and followed his travels from a distance once he finally departed the order’s mountain fastness, as he always knew Zenyatta would. In his wake, he left oases of tranquility, where Omnic and human came together and worked in harmony to make the world, or at least their particular piece of it, a more just and peaceful place. Mondatta had clearly respected his efforts, as well, and had paid the price for that respect in a way he knew must have wounded Zenyatta deeply. That he had not surrendered to grief or despair was…also admirable, Ramattra was willing to admit to himself, not entirely without bitterness.
Zenyatta was, by far, the best of the three of them. Possibly the best of all of them.
He was in India now, and had been for quite some time, assisting in the development of the community at Suravasa, the largest outside of Shambali itself. One that had, for the first time, placed itself in something close to opposition to a human endeavor, the voracious expansion of the Vishkar Corporation with its advanced technology, its primly dressed and publicly facile architechs, its charming habit of employing sonic-psychological control over both their employees and the residents of the cities their arcologies gradually devoured. Suravasa sat directly across from one, the remains of an ancient complex of palaces and gardens and temples repurposed for use as a monastery, where the residents offered food, shelter, and medical care to any who required it, spreading a more natural peace along the side of the river it occupied.
It was unlike Zenyatta to pick a fight, Ramattra reflected as he glided through the dense and tangled shadows outside Suravasa’s walls. He was, in fact, the one who usually resolved conflicts, settled quarrels, and found the way to move forward in harmony. Suravasa was…almost a provocation, an invitation for others to consider in sharp and impossible to miss contrast the difference between acceptance and inclusion and rigorously enforced corporate conformity masquerading as tranquility. And unusually bold for one who generally favored a middle path.
As with all of the order’s monasteries, a postern door occupied a hidden niche near the temple wall, so that siblings could come and go at all hours without disturbance. In the high mountains of Nepal, the local villagers would often come at odd hours seeking assistance and he supposed the humans here would be no different. Low powered LEDs, shielded in colored glass and activated by motion, came to life as he entered, though he detected no other security systems locking on to his presence. Careless, a part of him thought; warm, welcoming, hopeful , said another. He could not argue with either impulse and so he did not, slinking quietly through the halls of the temple.
At this time of night, Zenyatta would habitually be in one of two places: the infirmary, taking a late shift tending to any patients in need of medical care, or in his quarters, preparing to enter his own period of rest state. A swift in-and-out dip into Suravasa’s systems, as he took shelter in a shadowed niche, gave him the compound’s layout and a genuinely odd sensation that he was not the only being to intrude unasked into those systems recently. He wondered, briefly, as he made his way toward the wider corridors that led to the infirmary, if this is what humans called deja vu or --
His audio receptors, tuned high to detect the sound of voices or footsteps close by, triggered an internal alert -- something behind him, moving swiftly, a metallic resonance as a weapon was drawn and… thrown? He spun and barely raised his barrier in time to prevent the objects bearing down on him from making contact, deflecting them away to ricochet off the walls and skitter across the floor, striking sparks as they went. The being that had thrown them avoided being their victim -- and also his barrier -- by going over them, up one wall, pirouetting in midair to run down the opposite, drawing his sword as he came. Zenyatta’s human pet. What was his name?
“ Shimada. ” Ramattra hissed, the staff ringing in his hands as it took the blow meant to cleave him from shoulder to hip. “Is this any way to greet a brother of the Shambali, no matter how estranged?”
A flex of his arms flung his assailant back and a flex of his will lowered the shield to give him room to bring his weapon to bear, as the cyborg abomination skidded down the corridor with irritatingly flawless balance. He controlled both his irritation and his fire -- it would do him no good in his brother’s eyes to destroy what he was trying to build, a sentiment the pet seemed to share as he deflected the void projectiles streaming at him back to detonate harmlessly against the renewed shield. Those detonations echoed through the halls and, in the distance, Ramattra began to hear sounds of alarm. “I am not here to give battle, damn you . I wish to take counsel with my brother. That is all . Lower your weapon.”
The pet absorbed those words and, to his vast personal surprise, rose out of his defensive crouch and lowered his weapon, chisel tip to the floor. “You do not know.”
“Know what ?” Ramattra demanded, even as he lowered his own staff, if not the shield.
“Zenyatta is not here.” The pet replied, synthesized voice tight with…fear? Fury? “He was taken, two days ago, by Talon.”
“Lies. What use could Talon have for --” The words died away in his vocal processor before he could speak them as the realization of exactly the uses Talon would have for Zenyatta presented themselves in a stream of possibilities, each worse than the last, behind his optics. “Show me. What happened? ”
***
It took time -- an infuriating, frustrating, almost inconceivable amount of time -- to find where Talon had taken Zenyatta. They had not known when they began their search that Talon had taken possession of Blackwatch prisoner interdiction and interrogation sites; by the time they were done, both he and the pet were appalled by how many had been seized, their existence scrubbed from the collective memory of the world, and repurposed for Talon’s needs. In some cases, only lightly repurposed, such as the facility to which Zenyatta had been taken, nestled amid the industrial ruin of some minute and deeply failed Eastern European state.
The pet -- Genji Shimada , Ramattra forced himself to think, to say, was extremely competent at his areas of expertise, which included intelligence gathering and infiltration. He had, after all, begun his career as a trained assassin and continued it as a Blackwatch operative, and he had clearly not permitted those skills to atrophy even as he sought inner peace among the Shambali. They were through the outer layers of the site’s security and inside its walls before even the slightest difficulty arose that required any effort from Ramattra himself, and even then it was a minor hack of security systems to hide them from the view of any Talon operatives monitoring the camera feeds. Even the brief need for violence was swiftly accomplished and just as swiftly disposed of, the patrolling guards they encountered rendered senseless and subdued in short order.
“We will have to move quickly,” The pet murmured. “Their absence will be noticed.”
Ramattra resisted the urge to roll his optics at that unnecessary assertion and led the rest of the way himself. The locking mechanisms on the door to Zenyatta’s cell required a bit more effort -- it had, to his annoyance, its own aggressive intrusion countermeasures system that required some time to defeat without triggering a general alarm, though in the end it yielded.
Zenyatta was…not well.
The pet made a noise of distress in the back of his mostly synthetic throat at the sight of him and the only reason Ramattra did not was because it required all his strength not to lapse into Nemesis and begin tearing his way through the facility. And then it required all his care to help detach him from the devices that Talon had been using to restrain him, to interrogate him, to --
Ramattra did not want to admit, even to himself, all that had been done here, to Zenyatta. To his brother. To the best of the three of them, perhaps of all of them.
It required all the control he had ever learned to contain his rage, as Genji gathered Zenyatta and his orbs into his arms, a control that only barely held as they made their way back out. He channeled his fury into the intensity with which he covered their tracks, obliterating any trace of their presence in the facility and leaving its security system traumatized and reeling in his wake. It was not enough, when he desired to leave the entire place a smoking crater, but for now it would have to serve.
“I am taking him to Shambali -- the physicians and cyberneticists there will know best how to treat him.” Genji said, once they were clear of the site’s parabolic listening devices. “Will you…join us?”
It cost him greatly to ask that question and Ramattra knew it, acknowledged it. “No. I am not --”
Zenyatta, weak and uncoordinated, reached out and took his hand. “Brother. It does not…have to be this way.” His vocal processor hummed, damaged, but his voice was clear. “It is…not too late…to change your path. When you are ready…”
You have always been the best of us, Ramattra thought, but did not say, his grip on Zenyatta’s hand tightening. “I can make no promises, brother. There is much I…must yet do. Must yet resolve. But once I have…”
He did not, in fact, make any promises. Nor did he watch, as Genji Shimada loaded Zenyatta into the life support systems of his transport, and made speed overland away from that awful place and the terrible things done there. He turned, instead, back toward his own terrible place, and toward the plans he needed to make for Talon’s future.