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“Have you been to see him?” Genji asks that morning, his legs folded in a perfect lotus with the early-day sun in his lap. It interrupts the ephemeral peace that Zenyatta has finally forced over his thoughts, and he rises again to the surface where he sits across from his student.
“I have not.”
He'd arrived the night before, only six hours after receiving the news. No amount of meditation has been able to help it settle, and his spirit has been in a rare state of disarray. If he prolongs what must come next, then perhaps he won’t have to worry about it at all. He has long thought himself beyond such excuses, but it is not every day that someone he once loved rises from the dead.
Because despite everything, they've managed to bring Ramattra back online.
After two months, Zenyatta had allowed himself to accept that Ramattra was gone, that Null Sector’s war with humanity was over, and that the world could be left to lick its wounds and return to the project of peacebuilding. Though he'd been all too eager to board a shuttle directly to Gibraltar when the news reached him, he has not yet gathered the courage to face his old friend. But his hesitation is not something that Genji needs to know.
“I have simply required time to collect my thoughts,” he allows himself to admit, because that much is true.
There is doubt in the sudden tilt of Genji’s head, and Zenyatta finds a spark of pride in his chest. His student has become skilled at reading omnics. For better, or for worse. After two months of contemplating alone, it is nice to see Genji and to be in the presence of someone who understands him.
They remain in the silence of meditation for only a handful of minutes more when Genji releases his hands from their curled shape on his knees.
“You told me before about your old friend from the Shambali,” he begins tentatively, and Zenyatta gathers himself for what will surely be a challenging conversation. “But you failed to mention that he was also the leader of Null Sector.”
Throughout their shared lives, Ramattra has been many things. A protector in dangerous times. A gentle hand of guidance in the dark. A lover of the stars, and also Zenyatta's best friend. But Zenyatta must remember that to Genji and to Overwatch and to the world at large, Ramattra has never been those things.
“What he became was irrelevant to who he was when I knew him.” It is not completely the truth, for Zenyatta has taught his student that all paths contain the whole of a person’s story, but perhaps Genji senses the regret beneath the surface of Zenyatta’s tone. The hesitance in Genji’s eyes fades then, leaving only a wary understanding behind. Maybe he sees Hanzo in the anger of Ramattra’s betrayal, or even himself.
“So what happens now?” Genji asks, and it feels like being transported through time.
When their paths first crossed, Genji was a man shaped by hurt and vengeance and rage. A victim of troubled circumstances. Violent and raw, but no less deserving of Zenyatta’s mercy for the choices he made. Zenyatta has always believed in second chances, and he is not ready to abandon that particular tenet now.
“That will be up to him,” he says, trusting that Genji understands. For all of Zenyatta’s patience, the unwilling cannot be saved.
But Ramattra was his friend, once, and so he will certainly try.
It takes all day for him to find his courage. After the goodnights are bid and agreements made to meditate in the morning, Zenyatta waits until the Watchpoint has fallen silent before creeping from his quarters. With his feet pulled up above the ground, he doesn't make a sound.
At this hour, the engineering bay is empty. Scattered mechanical parts and tools loom like omnic corpses in the dark, and without Brigitte’s sunny disposition to colour the space, even the table upon which standard repairs are carried out seems dangerous and foreboding. The thought of anyone–much less someone who was once his friend–spread upon it sends a tremble of electricity coursing up the wires of Zenyatta’s spine.
Along the far wall, an observation window has been cut into what was once a solid surface. Other than a locked door, there are no weapons present, no failsafes in case of emergency. From what Zenyatta has heard, Ramattra is still too damaged to be much of a threat to anyone, and he gathers his mental fortitude for what might face him. The news of Ramattra’s revival had seemed like an impossibility, and part of Zenyatta still has not come to believe it.
It is not strictly forbidden for Zenyatta to access the cell, so he inputs his agent number and passcode into the digital lock and enters once the door opens with a pneumatic hiss. It shuts solidly behind him again, and the ambient sounds of Watchpoint Gibraltar fade like they’ve been drained from the room.
The cell beyond is dim and cramped, a modified storage space that has had the bloat of shelves stripped out and a wall replaced by the reinforced observation window. There are no human amenities, no comforts provided but a raised, solid surface in place of a cot. And in the back of the cell, seated in the shadows with his legs folded and his hands pressed together in meditation, is a miracle.
Ramattra, despite the wide shape of his shoulders and straight posture of his spine, looks small. Small and damaged and vulnerable, but somehow, alive.
“Why have you come here, Zenyatta?” Ramattra asks, giving no sign that he’d noticed Zenyatta enter at all. His cracked faceplate is turned down towards his lap, his focus thrumming through his energy field even without the presence of an orb in which to concentrate it. In the harsh shapes and barely-sealed gashes on Ramattra’s body, Zenyatta finds only defeat.
“I have come because there is more to say,” he replies, letting his feet touch the ground only enough to make noise. With Ramattra seated on the floor, they are nearly of a height, if only Ramattra would raise his eyes to look at him.
“More to say,” Ramattra echoes, bitter. “What else could there possibly be? It is over. I have lost.”
“This does not need to be the end,” Zenyatta reminds him. “It seems the Iris was not yet ready to receive you; Perhaps your work here is not finished.”
Ramattra seemingly does not have a response to that. Zenyatta reads in his body and their shared memories that he still believes himself lost, that there is no place within the Iris for him. It is a sickness that no reassurance can cure, so Zenyatta adds, “And I wished to see you. It is a relief that you are alive.”
That, at least, stirs a frustrated huff from Ramattra’s ventilation outputs. “Alive, perhaps, but trapped in this place.”
“Overwatch will not harm you,” Zenyatta assures him.
“It is not the potential of hurt that concerns me.” Finally lifting his attention to Zenyatta's face, Ramattra is cold like steel. But despite his collected demeanor, there is a tremble of despair when he vows, “I will not allow myself to become some human organisation’s pet.”
Though he does not know the full extent of the humans’ plans for him, Zenyatta soothes, “You are reading intentions that are not there.”
“Then why?” In a motion that is surely not as smooth as he intended it, Ramattra pulls himself to his feet, the damage littering his chassis groaning with the effort. For all their expertise, Brigitte and Mercy cannot return a Ravager to perfection. “Why keep me alive at all?”
And with him standing so close, the edges of their energy fields brushing together, Zenyatta reads what Ramattra truly wants to know.
Why am I still here? he pleads to empty air. Why will Aurora not take me?
There is nothing new that Zenyatta can say, no words or prayers to heal this hurt, so he voices the one thing they have both always agreed to be true. “Our people still need help.”
And under the weight of the responsibility he has chosen to carry alone, Ramattra’s shoulders sink. “Yes. They do.”
They are left to a heavy silence, then, the entire distance of their diverging paths stretching between them. If Zenyatta were to reach out, to attempt to meet with Ramattra again in this life, would he reach back?
Zenyatta’s hand remains at his side when he says, “Your old path is at its end. But it is clear that the world is not yet ready to part with you.”
And, perhaps the hardest truth of all, “I am not yet ready to part with you.”
For a moment Ramattra's hard shell cracks, and Zenyatta sees him as he was when they first met: good natured to his soul, but so desperately lost. With an obliging sigh, Ramattra says, “You always were too gracious for your own good.”
“What some might see as a flaw, I choose to interpret as quality.” Putting a smile into his voice in hopes of drawing his friend out, Zenyatta adds, “Only one of many that I possess.”
Beneath the hard white plasteel of his faceplate, Ramattra’s gaze is searching. Studying, but less like a calculating machine of war and more like a man grasping for a foothold. Carefully, Ramattra lifts his hand, the backs of his knuckles ghosting the metal at the side of Zenyatta’s face.
“How long has it been since we last saw each other?”
It occurs to Zenyatta that, after being pulled awake from the black of death with his network capacity purposefully severed, Ramattra has spent the last two days divorced from time. Likely neither does he know where he is, and Zenyatta hurts for him. He should have visited sooner.
“Two months,” Zenyatta says, and in his mind he sees Ramattra as he last was: shattered and defeated, laid among the rubble of the omnium at the centre of his war with humanity. At the time, it had felt like finality. An end to a lifetime of crossed paths, the stop at the end of the road.
But now Ramattra is here, on his feet despite it all.
“Two months,” Ramattra echoes like it refuses to settle. “Null Sector is gone, then?”
In his chest, Zenyatta’s soul clenches. He did not approve of Ramattra’s methods, but Null Sector was undeniably an extension of him, a lifelong project into which he poured himself. And now… “It is in the process of being dismantled, yes.”
The hand that has hung by his face, energy buzzing against his chassis without fully touching, is suddenly gripping at Zenyatta’s cloak. He is thrown down by the force before he has time to react. Without his orbs, left behind in his room until morning meditation, Zenyatta falls to his back on the raised cot without resistance. Like a beast above, Ramattra looms with his arms as a cage around him.
“So you’ve been sent to tame me, then,” Ramattra goads, his voice sharp with hurt. “The war is over, and your humans want to show me that they’ve won. To force me into submission.”
Surfacing is the barely-contained rage that Zenyatta witnessed at King's Row, the golden monument for their departed master standing above them. It is the roiling fire beneath his surface unleashed, as much the Ramattra that Zenyatta once knew as it is a monster he has lost himself to.
Perhaps Zenyatta should be afraid. Mondatta certainly was.
But Zenyatta is not his master, and Mondatta’s unwillingness to see beyond the shape of Ramattra's chassis is one of the only things that Zenyatta has never been able to forgive. Mondatta was undeniably among the wisest of them all, and still he did not believe that Ramattra was capable of peace. If only he'd felt gentleness sooner, then perhaps Ramattra would not have needed to prove his master right.
But Ramattra is here now, and Zenyatta vows that he will not abandon him to this path again.
“I have never wished to change you,” he says, willing Ramattra to believe him. “Your heart and love for our people is true. I only hoped we could work together, this time.”
“Now you want to work together,” Ramattra chides, his tone thick with sarcasm. But something in Zenyatta’s words seems to have touched him, because the angry storm remains tempered, the boundaries of their energy fields settling back into the stride that they once shared.
It makes Zenyatta feel like a young omnic again. Young like he was on the night Ramattra guided him in connecting to his first orb, his first taste of harmony with the world beyond his own body. Ramattra is capable of that harmony, too, and Zenyatta hopes he can finally return the lessons he was once taught.
With a possibility of a second chance for them both, Zenyatta raises his arms up through the space between them until he reaches the surface of Ramattra’s chassis. With his hands pressed to the scarred metal of Ramattra's rib plating, he can feel the steady hum of energy and ventilators beneath the surface.
“The deepest irony,” Ramattra begins, attention locked on Zenyatta like there are answers to be gleaned from the reflections in his face, “is that for all the ways I resented you, the endless nights wondering how you could have possibly betrayed me…”
With the space between them bridged by Zenyatta's hands, Ramattra leans his faceplate in close.
“...I still missed you,” he hums, voice low and resonant in his vocoder like a whisper. With his weight above him, hands pressing into the surface of the cot on either side of Zenyatta's head, Zenyatta wishes it all could have been different.
“I missed you, as well. Every day.”
With Ramattra’s face still held close, Zenyatta focuses on the way their energies press against each other like ocean currents. Zenyatta’s smooth harmony, gentle as a lake on a windless day, clashing and mixing with the roil of Ramattra's discord.
“I should have had you like this years ago,” Ramattra says then, the desperation that has always haunted him surfacing behind his eyes. “Under the stars, before it all went wrong. I wanted to.”
And against his better judgement, against the Shambali teachings that once held his tongue, Zenyatta finally admits, “I did, as well.”
The words ignite Ramattra like a fuse, and suddenly he is bearing down upon Zenyatta, a curious pressing together of their chassis that is surely learned from humans. It is not something he would have expected from Ramattra, but with the way pressure sensors and tactile arrays light up in his mind, bright and hot like fire, Zenyatta does not mind. The craving for Ramattra that wells within his chest stings like two decades of being apart.
With Ramattra’s network card disabled, the only way for them to connect is through a physical tether. In a frustrated hurry, Ramattra shifts his weight from his arms, a hand burrowing into the ribbon cables at his head and emerging with the end of a wire gripped in his fist.
Its spindle turns soundlessly as Ramattra pulls the length of it forward. And Zenyatta, as much as he craves Ramattra’s mind against his own, forces himself to catch his hand in the air between them.
Met with resistance, Ramattra halts with a frustrated grunt.
“I have a condition,” Zenyatta announces, amused by the way Ramattra recoils.
“A condition?” Ramattra repeats, affronted. His impatience carries in his voice, sharp like a blade.
“I would like for you to see my memories,” Zenyatta says, his mind struggling to remain focussed with Ramattra’s presence looming over him. But if they are both to survive the coming months, then it is important, and so he pushes on. “Allow me to show you what I see in them. Grant humanity another chance.”
“Even in a moment like this,” Ramattra growls, anger fighting the heavy breath in his tone, “you defend them?”
Squeezing Ramattra’s fist more tightly, Zenyatta nods only once. “You have not had the fortune of seeing them like I have. There is good in humanity, Ramattra–I only wish to prove it to you.”
The silence that is left to hang between them, broken only by the heaving of air beneath the surface of Ramattra's chassis, is like a coiled spring. It is as heavy as their final night at the Shambali, the question of their future left unspoken for one moment longer. Zenyatta holds Ramattra’s gaze, his battery buzzing in his chest, and he needs Ramattra to agree. Zenyatta does not know what he will do otherwise.
Then, the trembling rage in Ramattra’s body releases, and he turns his head with a suffering groan.
“Fine,” he says, a desperate note beneath the indignation in his voice. “I will see your memories. After,” he adds sharply, bearing the weight of his hips down further into Zenyatta even as he pushes the cable forward.
The agreement barely registers in Zenyatta’s mind, the flood of relief drowned by the new sensation against his chassis, and he relents to the pressure on his hand. Ramattra finds the connection port on the back of Zenyatta’s head, and his presence floods into Zenyatta’s mind like a torrent.
He is all rage and domination and hurt, exactly how Zenyatta imagined him. It is the desperation of an omnic who has carried the burden of his kind alone. The pain of giving up everything and still having failed, the chance to grab at something he thought forever lost and never let it go.
For all the years they have been apart, for all the death and destruction and the diverging of paths, Zenyatta remembers the kindness with which Ramattra approached him on the day they met. Buried beneath the rage and tucked under layers of hurt, that damaged, weary part of him hides like a pearl to be protected.
So Zenyatta allows Ramattra to take, allows him to gorge himself on their connection with the aggression of a beast, and all the while Zenyatta buries himself into the cracks of Ramattra's mind.
Despite two decades’ worth of distance between them, the shape of Ramattra’s soul is still that of his friend, and Zenyatta knows how to weave himself through the fear and anger and to the core of him. He takes Ramattra into his own mind, meets his rage with gentleness, feels the weight of Ramattra pressing against his body as he wraps his arms around Ramattra's shoulders.
He holds on until Ramattra’s anger has burned away. Left behind is a raw desperation that manifests in the squeezing of Ramattra's hands at Zenyatta's back, and he allows himself to be held in turn.
When their breathing has settled and clear thoughts begin to return, Ramattra pulls the tether from where they are connected at Zenyatta's nape before too much can pass between them.
With the connection severed, they are left in the cushion of hot air that vents from their bodies, simply watching each other. There is a wariness that has crept into Ramattra's chassis, like despite what they have just shared, the way they have walked each other's minds and thoughts, it will still mean nothing. But with Ramattra above him, ribbon cables showering down in a curtain with a familiar streak of red among them, all Zenyatta can wonder is why Anubis made its soldiers so beautiful.
His hand finds its way to the side of Ramattra's faceplate, and he wishes they had shared each other's minds in this way sooner. For the thousandth time he wonders if there was some way to have saved his friend, if some combination of gentleness and love could have convinced Ramattra that anger did not need to be his cure.
The moment passes when Ramattra turns them over, the damaged parts of his chassis groaning until he is settled on his back with Zenyatta tucked into his chest. In the dim light of the cell, Ramattra admits, “I wish you had come with me.”
And Zenyatta thinks, then, to that final day at the monastery, the shape of Ramattra's back as he left them to face the world alone. He thinks of the long years after, without a word from his friend, wondering if Ramattra still lived or if he'd been lost like so many others. And when Mondatta was killed and Zenyatta left to navigate the world alone, wandering in search of answers–he often dreamed of how things might have been different if only he'd left by Ramattra's side. If only he'd convinced Mondatta to stay. If only.
But by the time Null Sector appeared on the world stage with a Ravager at its head, Zenyatta knew that Ramattra's path would lead all of them to ruin.
“You know why I could not,” Zenyatta replies, seeing the heartbreak for what it is and feeling it just as keenly.
“Yes, because the humans are more deserving of your pity than we are of freedom.” The hurt in Ramattra's tone, the bitterness and bite, is so familiar to the Ramattra in Zenyatta's final memories of him that he mourns his friend all over again.
“It is not pity that I offer them,” Zenyatta corrects, rolling the red wire laid for so long among the cables on Ramattra's head between his fingers. A piece of Zenyatta to carry with him, until their paths cross again. “It is hope for a shared future. A hope that is not unearned.”
When Ramattra only huffs, Zenyatta lifts himself from his position on Ramattra's chest just enough to see his faceplate.
“Allow me to prove it to you. We had an agreement, after all.”
“Right now?” The exhaustion mixed into Ramattra’s voice is almost enough to make Zenyatta laugh, but he suppresses the urge enough to maintain his demeanor and nods.
In a drawn moment, he considers the possibility that Ramattra will refuse. But then there is a great heaving of breath, and Ramattra again fishes for the cable at the back of his own neck. For the second time, Zenyatta stops him with a hand. Ramattra does not quite growl, but it is evident that his patience is reaching its end.
“If you’re to truly see,” Zenyatta explains, guiding Ramattra’s hand to release the cable, “then it must come from me.”
Feeling at the back of his own head, Zenyatta finds the cable nestled in his nape and tugs to unlock its spindle. Ramattra only watches, still as the dead with his attention like reverent fascination. It isn’t until Zenyatta’s hand reaches the ribbon cables around his face that Ramattra catches his wrist.
“I–” Ramattra begins. When no explanation manifests, Zenyatta presses his faceplate against Ramattra’s own.
“May I ask you, one more time, to trust me?”
Two months and a lifetime ago, at what was supposed to be the end of the intertwined paths of their lives, he'd requested trust before. With Ramattra broken at his feet, his trust was all Zenyatta had needed before he lost his friend forever. Because as long as Ramattra still trusted him, then the decades of wishing they had not been driven apart were not wasted.
And Ramattra, still frozen with Zenyatta’s wrist viced in his hand, abandons his indignation and dips his chin. He helps Zenyatta lift the ribbon cabling at his head, exposing the port on his neck, and Zenyatta inserts the connection with a gentle click.
With the cable secured, Zenyatta resettles himself against Ramattra’s chest, testing the bounds of their minds as he presses himself within. Beneath Zenyatta’s head, Ramattra’s breathing steadies, the sound paced and rhythmic like sleep, and Zenyatta wonders if this is how humans feel when they share their bodies, warm and safe within the confines of their beds.
Perhaps it is another of their rituals that he could come to respect.
What humans do not possess is the capacity to share memories. With great care, Zenyatta guides Ramattra through them one after another, leading him along the moments that have kept him pressing forward.
Ramattra aches when he sees the love in Zenyatta's mind, the way he would give his life for his human student or those who have taken up the project of peace by his side. He aches and recoils against it, but Zenyatta pulls him back, begs him to see through the fog of his own hatred and to the good that humanity has displayed.
There is Genji, charming and humourous, a bridge between the human and the machine whose rage nearly devoured him. Niran and Satya are at Zenyatta's side, providing care to a people that is not their own. Beneath stars and lights there are Christmas Eves and kind merriment. An omnic passes him by on the street, arm-in-arm with their human lover, laughing in the open sunlight.
A thousand casual moments, uncountable loves and a shared hope, all woven into the tapestry that convinces Zenyatta every day that the future will be bright and warm. He longs to pull Ramattra to him, to drape that fabric over his raised hackles and let him feel the hope that could be his if only he'd allow himself to believe it.
They walk Zenyatta’s memories until sleep takes them both. He knows that Ramattra’s rest has always been dreamless, but with their minds still tethered, he can feel the presence that follows him from thought to thought. He dreams the same ones he always does, these days–dreams of a future that once seemed so unattainable, lived one moment at a time every day, one in which humans and omnics have overcome their differences and found peace together.
It is not so bad a dream, Zenyatta thinks, and he hopes Ramattra agrees.
After what feels like no time at all, Ramattra announces, “We have company.”
It jolts Zenyatta from sleep, and he realises that it has been a long time since his situational awareness has been so low, even while resting. His chronometer tells him that it has been five hours since he was last awake, a fact that explains the sudden tension in Ramattra's body. When Zenyatta lifts his head, he finds a familiar blue face peering at them through the observation window.
“Good morning!” Echo greets, chipper despite her obvious curiosity. Behind her, Brigitte is already setting up her tools for the day, and though she is averting her eyes it is clear that her attention is nowhere but the unfolding development in the cell.
Perhaps it is awkward to be caught in such a compromising position, but of all the members of Overwatch to see it, Zenyatta supposes that Echo and Brigitte are the least damaging. Clearing his voice, he replies, “And a good morning to you, Echo.”
“Sojourn wishes to speak with you,” she announces then, all cheery business. It is not the news he would have wished to hear at this hour, but he supposes it should not be unexpected. In the upper corner of the cell, the security camera’s light blinks with pointed attention.
Extracting himself from Ramattra’s side feels like shedding a piece of his soul. Disconnecting the tether even more so, his mind left cold and empty where once there was another to share it. It is a strange sensation, considering the long years they have spent apart, but he realises now that he may have underestimated the grief still present in his heart. The thought will require extensive meditation later.
“I trust you will be alright?” With his feet lifted again from the floor, Zenyatta asks back into the depths of the cell. Ramattra has stood and already turned away, and in the light of morning the damage to his chassis is even greater than Zenyatta had assessed the night before. It is a wonder that he stands at all, but Ramattra always did have a stubbornness to him that extended beyond the simple build of his model.
“You have given me much to consider,” Ramattra says, his disposition returned to the careful neutrality that marks a noble leader rather than a friend. With his back turned, Zenyatta cannot read the level of sincerity behind the words, and he wonders if his chance to convince Ramattra might have already passed him by. But then Ramattra shifts, just enough for Zenyatta to catch the edge of his faceplate over his shoulder, and says, “I am true to my word, Zenyatta. I will give it thought.”
It is not the joyous reunion of their paths that Zenyatta had foolishly allowed himself to see in his dreams, but for now, it will have to be enough.