Chapter Text
The Void has been a buzz in the back of Wraith's head for weeks.
It started as a faint thing, like a fly trapped in a curtain; a prickle along the edge of her senses, so subtle she wasn't sure if it was real or not. Only noticeable when she was alone and the voices were quiet and she really focused on it.
It hasn't gotten louder. It's still as quiet as it was before, a distant annoyance which crawls along her skin like the tiniest of spiders. But it's gotten more… more insistent. Harder to ignore in the quiet of her quarters after matches, when the voices fall silent and there's just the white noise whistle of the Void in her head. She finds her mind drifting to it constantly. Even when she's trying to do other things—sharpening her kunai, repairing a rip in her scarf, maintaining her bracer—there is is. Calling.
Just a little disturbance. But a disturbance nonetheless, a ripple in a normally still pond, and maybe that's why her thoughts keep drifting back to it. Why her mind keeps tugging at its edges, trying to distinguish its hum; even when she's trying to relax and unwind from the tension of the Games, she finds she can't stop thinking about it.
When Wraith goes to draw in her journal and her thoughts drift again and the tip of her pencil trails off and begins to sketch out the abdomen of a fly, she knows she needs to do something about it.
She doesn't go far out into the Void often. At… all, really. Just necessary things, phase walking in battle, punching tunnels, or else slipping into the negative mirror of her room just to feel the quiet wind of her second home.
The dimension she lives in right now, the one where she gets shot at for a living, shoots people in turn; the one where there's a flamboyant man in canary yellow who smiles when he says her name and a robot who's grown on her despite everything… that's not the dimension she was born in, but it's home. It's hers.
A part of her is afraid that if she slips into the Void, closes the portal, steps too far from it, she might not be able to find home again.
But Wraith also knows this: the voices will guide her back. They always have.
It only takes a few minutes for her bracer to charge to full once she winds the wire beneath her clothes and plugs it into the medical port buried in her shoulder. Its holographic interface flashes cheery orange at her: one hundred percent charge, it reads in bright letters.
It's a long time before her next match. Wraith has plenty of time.
Opening a portal is like tearing through a curtain and opening a door at the same time. A rippling sensation felt only in the sixth sense ripples down her chest, settles against her heart. As the fabric of reality folds in and over on itself, pulling outwards from the palm of her hand, the Void's chill floods over and through her. Through the portal, she can see the greyed-out wall of her quarters, nearly devoid of decoration; past it, a reflection of the same room, and another, and another, and an uncountable number of her other selves, looking and stepping through portals of their own.
She follows suit.
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Wraith flexes her fingers against the sudden rush of energy that flows through her when she enters the Void, feeling the bracer hum electric against her arm as it holds the portal open. Even familiar with the tech as she is, (she's repaired it herself more times than she can count) it still never fails to impress on her the sheer amount of power phase technology eats up. It's part of the reason why (bar her) only titans and simulacra are capable of phasing.
She turns a quarter, raises her hand towards the open portal; reaches in a way that's like moving in a direction that doesn't exist, grabs at its frayed edges. Slowly, her hand closes into a fist. Slowly, the portal closes with it, with her.
Lightning rushes like fire up her arm and she hisses through her teeth. Her arm wavers, but she holds it steady; with a final, echoing crackle, the portal seals shut.
Damn. Sealing portals early hurts. Wraith shakes her arm out, wincing as she feels the bracer rub against irritated skin; but it's better than leaving it open right here in her quarters. There's a difference between the phase tunnels she uses in the games and the open aperture of the kind of portal that lets her step into the Void and stay. She's not going to let anyone else around the latter.
Now. Back to what she was doing.
The buzzing in her head—and it is in her head, not the Void—hasn't gotten any stronger. But it's still there; Wraith can feel it, a sixth-sense sensation that hums on the inside of her skull. She turns, eyeing the pale reflection of her surroundings thoughtfully.
It's not here, her voice tells her. She turns, glancing through the mirrors of the Void; three reflections down, another version of her gestures with a hand to follow, before walking through the door of her quarters.
Without the anchor of a portal, the Void… changes. Wraith has experienced it before. She knows what's coming when she opens her own door.
The scene beyond is like a vague memory of the dropship. In front of her is the common area; to her right and left, the wings which hold the other Legends' quarters, but they're far too long for what they're supposed to be. Dreamlike in distance; stretched to eternity. As Wraith follows her other self across the dropship, the sharp ring of the metal beneath her feet begins to fade, the sound distorting as it echoes.
Another reason she doesn't do this often. She's fine with this right now, she's seen it enough times before, but considering what her head is like… she's got a shaky enough grip on reality as is. Spending too much time in the Void like this, wandering too far… it makes her feel less tangible. It makes her feel like she's been forgotten. A memory of a dream which never happened. It's easier to anchor herself, remind herself the world, her life is real, when she's got something solid and full of color to hold onto.
But the buzzing in her head is getting stronger, now. The tingling thrum of it has spread to her temple. She raises a hand to rub at it and realizes—
—it's a signal.
Kind of. More like a ping on a radar, really; a blip in the Void that her sensitivity to the place has picked up from afar.
But a signal has direction. She can follow a signal.
She glances to the side; her other self nods at her, knowingly. Together, they pick up the pace.
This far into the Void, she's left the dropship entirely. What was once the distinct shape of a ship she knows has grown into something empty and endless. A half-hearted wind blows around her, fluttering her scarf. Her feet feel like they're walking on air. She doesn't look back; she knows she won't see the ship behind her.
The echoes of other dimensions shine all around her. It's like walking through a box of mirrors, except the mirrors go on and on and on. Forever and ever. Eternity.
The world is infinite and the timelines are infinite and the Void is infinite and it makes Wraith's head spin to witness it all, the Void without an anchor of a dimension just reflecting itself.
Where are you? What are you? she thinks, mind wandering to the signal, the strangeness of it when usually the Void only prickles like this when she's folding it open. She follows it anyway, knowing that she's feeling it for a reason. The Void doesn't just disturb itself. Whatever it is, whatever she's following… it has to be important.
It's stronger now. The thrumming, humming feeling has pitched downwards, over her chest like a half-hearted blanked; buzzing over her ribcage like a message. Once again, she thinks of insects; this time of a moth bumping against a lamp again and again, so determined to fulfill an unknown purpose.
And suddenly there is a flash of brightest orange, stark as a lighthouse against the washed-out blues of the Void, and Wraith's heart skips a beat.
Another person. She's trapped.
That can't be right, she thinks—for half a moment. But then Wraith remembers why she's here in the first place. She remembers that people learned about the place between, they learned there were other dimensions out there, and they wanted to use the Void. They wanted to tear open a rift and harness it, to look in places where they were never supposed to look, and—
She was one of them.
And now across all the dimensions, there are countless numbers of her, all victim to the same crime, and is it really such a surprise there's one in the same Void at the same time as her?
It only shocks her when she draws closer, the woman turns at her footsteps… and she doesn't have the same face as her.
Oh. Oh.
"Wraith?" the woman asks, and her dull veneer of horror at seeing someone who isn't her in the Void shatters in favor of a—
"How do you know my name?" she says, tone sharpening to wariness.
"Oh." she says, unfazed. "I guess you haven't met me yet."
That… explains nothing. "What do you mean?"
The woman smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "You could say I had an accident. I'm not tied to my timeline anymore. I've met you… but you haven't met me, yet."
…just when Wraith thinks nothing can surprise her anymore, something always pops up. She thought she was used to dimensional travel. She thought she was used to the differences between dimensions, the way they changed the further you went like ripples in a pond. She thought she was used to the way that certain events could happen sooner or later in a dimension, even though all the dimensions happened at the same time.
She guesses that wasn't certain, either.
"...okay," she says, deciding to just roll with it. She can turn the tangle of implications this has over in her head later. Time travel or not, this woman is still stuck in the Void; a fate she wouldn't wish on anyone, let alone someone who seems without the guiding line of her other selves. Speaking of which—
—her eyes flick up to glance behind the woman, wondering if her reflections are there too. And they are, but… they're wrong. They move like faulty holograms behind her; disjointed, jerky, empty. Some of them aren't their dimension at all. Some dimensions have more than one of them standing in the same mirror, but they seem somehow unaware of each other.
Wraith looks back at the woman, meets her eyes. "How did you end up here?"
"Huh. Didn't take you long to accept that," the woman comments.
"I've seen a lot," Wraith says.
"You look it." The woman taps her fingers on her hips in consideration. "You can tell from the outfit I'm a pilot, right? I was testing a new prototype. The Slipstream. Fancy name, huh? It was supposed to be able to teleport mid-flight."
Oh. Wraith understands now. She knows where this is going before she even finishes the story—
"But something went wrong." The woman's staring at the ground now, the insubstantial grey-blueness beneath them. "And," she shrugs. "Here I am."
A beat before she meets Wraith's eyes. "You told me this place was the Void."
I told her that? Wraith doesn't talk about the Void to anyone. It's dangerous. She knows what people will do with that kind of knowledge. The sacrifices they'll make… the people they'll hurt. It's safer if she keeps it close to her chest.
But, well, the woman's the one stuck here… she's seeing it right before her eyes. Wraith can imagine herself making that kind of exception. "What else did I tell you?"
Even the questions don't feel that absurd. It's just like another version of herself visited the woman earlier. The only difference is that it's a version in her timeline, instead of another's.
"Not much. Your name, where we are… you said I would meet you later."
"Well—here I am," Wraith says. "You know my name. What's yours?"
"Lena," she says. And then again: "Lena Oxton." Like she's scared the name will vanish if she doesn't get it out. Maybe she's clinging to her identity the way Wraith did when she first escaped. When her title was new and all she had in a world where she was still scared of drifting into the Void like a stringless balloon.
"Lena," Wraith repeats, writing the name into reality. If nothing else, she'll make sure she isn't forgotten. "Nice to meet you."
"I'd say good to meet you too, but…" She laughs a little. "Already have."
Wraith nods, amused. "I'll hear it later on down the road."
"You got that right."
The conversation lulls. The wind of the Void whispers between them in the quiet; the breeze whips through Lena's hair, and she shivers, rubbing her hands over her biceps. "Brr," Lena says, shivering. "It's like a fridge in here! How aren't you cold?"
Wraith quirks an eyebrow at her. "I'm used to it."
"Used to it, huh?" Lena purses her lips, thoughtful. "Wraith…"
She pauses. Then, "...how long have you been here?"
Wraith blinks. Oh. She thinks I'm stuck here.
"I phase between dimensions," she says, tilting her arm towards Lena so she can see the bracer. "I walk the line."
"Oh!" she says, leaning forward; there's a glimmer in her eye that Wraith's seen on Elliot before. A fascination with the technology. "Wicked."
Now it's Wraith's turn to ask, "What about you?"
"Me? How long I've…" Lena trails off into forced laughter. "Ha! Haven't a clue. I've been between too many 'whens' to keep track."
Lena meets her eyes—hesitates, like she's not sure she wants to share this, but then.
"It isn't all the Void," she says.
"What do you mean?" Wraith asks, but she's thinking of other timelines, glimpses of shadows of herself, and she thinks she knows what she's going to say.
"Sometimes…" Lena bites her lip. "I'm in my time… but not. It's further back, or… or too far forward. I keep seeing…"
Lena's voice dies. Tentatively, Wraith reaches out; her hand hovers over Lena's shoulder. She's not sure if she'll be okay with the touch.
But Lena looks up at her; nods.
Wraith lets her hand rest on the curve of her shoulder. Tension melts from Lena in the form of a gentle exhale. She leans in a little bit.
"I have seen myself die… more times than I can count," Wraith says. In dreams; in the waking world. Each murmur of a voice on the battlefield a reminder of a doomed timeline. Each glimpse into the mirrors of the Void holds the Wraiths that don't make it out in time. Those who ran right instead of left. Those who zigged instead of zagged.
"I saw my whole world die," Lena replies. "Everything I knew… scrap metal. Like someone set it on fire, and nobody was around to put it out."
Something gleams on Lena's face. Tears run silently from the corners of her eyes and over her cheeks.
Wraith doesn't comment on it. She only holds Lena's shoulder a little tighter; Lena leans in a little more in kind.
Yes, there are doomed timelines out there. So many of them. Wraith is certain that for so many of the others she's seen, it's only a matter of time. It's only the odds; only a matter of time before at least one of them burns, too. Maybe hers is too. Maybe one day her luck will run out, and that will be it.
But for as many doomed timelines as there are, there are so many more that don't end that way. There are a million billion choices out there, a hundred thousand alone that Wraith has considered, chosen. Echoes of whispers that led to dodging bullets—the advice to turn right for freedom, the knowledge that others have burned, died, failed, but they are not her.
In many ways, so many ways, the Void is a curse. It is an existence that Wraith would not wish on her worst enemy. There are better things that the overwhelming tide of voices that she drowns in, some days. There are better things than the loss of everything she knew, the person she was, and the aching search to pick up what little pieces remain. (She is glad Lena was spared that, at least.)
But sometimes, it is a gift.
"That future doesn't have to happen," she tells Lena.
"How? I didn't believe in fate before… all this, but…" She gestures weakly.
There's no such thing as fate. That's what Wraith learned from the void. That's what the voidwalker taught her; that is the sharp knowledge she'll pass on.
"There's more than one road ahead of us," Wraith tells her, voice heavy with the things she knows. "Each decision—a new direction. Your choices matter. You didn't get here by doing nothing, did you?"
"Fat lot of good that did me," Lena says. "I want to believe there's better things out there! But—"
"Lena," Wraith interrupts. "You remember what you've seen. You know where the road leads. Change it."
Lena looks at her for a few moments, but falls quiet. After it's made clear that Wraith doesn't have anything further to say, she sighs; tilts her head back and looks up at the endless sky of the Void that's not really a sky at all. Wraith stares up at it with her, letting her process all that.
"It's funny," Lena says after a while. Wraith looks at her, notices a lopsided smile on her face. "You know why I became a pilot?"
She fiddles with her belt, still smiling. "I wanted to change the world."
Wraith wonders what she wants to do with her life. It's a question she's grappled with for a while; part of the reason she's searching, hoping for any scrap of her old self so fervently is because she hopes that will give her to answer. And in the process, it's led her to things she'd never expect; brought her to people she never expected to become friends with.
Their choices matter. Each decision, a fork in the road. Another way to another place.
She thinks Lena will pick the right path.
And then her hand goes through Lena's shoulder.
Wraith blinks at the sudden intangibility, reminded of one of Elliot's duplicates; but when she looks up, Lena's still there. Just… flickering.
"Oh!" Lena says, and shoots her a wink. "No worries! Just my timeline acting up again!"
Just. Wraith raises an eyebrow, watching as Lena slowly begins to fade, the background mirror of the Void bleeding through behind her. Lena raises a hand up to her face, watching herself flicker in and out.
When she speaks again, it's like radio static. "Chin up, love! Remember what I said earlier? You'll meet me again. Maybe even soon!"
"And what about you?" Wraith asks.
"Oh, don't mind me. Don't think anything could hurt me while I'm like this. I'll just do a little sightseeing!"
And then she's gone. Just like that: no ripple, no flash, nothing. In between one blink and the next, like a ghost.
That's the thing: Wraith knows she'll see her again, but she doesn't know when. For all she knows, it could be an hour from now, it could be next week, it could be a year. But other than that? And will Wraith even meet a version of her that remembers her?
Lena's still stuck like this, too. She's still going to show up in the Void. That's no way to live. She needs help. She needs a way out.
Wraith looks at the place where Lena was just a moment ago and steely resolve wells up in her. She found Lena once. When she comes back into reality, she'll find her again.
And she'll get her free.