Work Text:
At night, Ana dreams of ruin. Not the ruin of the Omnic Crisis, where the streets ran with blood and the morgues were full, and even when she was able to escape the city, to find a clear space, they were covered with bodies as far as the eye could see, not the strange bursting fullness of those years, where everything was too much, was felt too deeply, where lights were too bright, sounds too loud, and Ana felt trapped, by duty, by circumstance, by fate; Ana dreams of ruin, but not the ruin she knew 32 years ago.
Instead, Ana’s dreams are empty, with no one left for her to save—or fail to—but herself. In them, she walks between the buildings of the headquarters of Overwatch, but it is long abandoned, and she wants to call out to someone, to find anyone, but cannot remember any names. They have gone, all of them, and left her here—but when, and why? If she could find them, find anyone, she might escape, might not be helpless, might not be trapped, here, as she is—but she cannot. She wanders, lost, alone, in silence, with nothing and no one left to her, until they end, always in the same way.
Always, the silence is broken by a terrible groaning, and then a scream—not those of a person, for that would mean she is not alone and she is, she is alone—the girders of the buildings between which she walks are collapsing, the buildings falling in on her. Then, and only then, does her mouth open, then and only then does a name come to her lips.
She opens her mouth to scream, to cry out, but she chokes on the dust before she can say it.
Fareeha.
(In the years since her daughter died disappeared, the therapists Ana was forced to see have offered her a myriad of opinions on her dreams, and she discounts all of them. What does it mean to her, if the ruins are Overwatch, if the missing people are stand-ins for Fareeha, if her silence is her helplessness. Nothing! It means nothing if it will not bring her daughter back. Nothing means anything, anymore, by those standards, and those are the only standards that matter.)
So when Ana wakes, yet gain, eyes still bleary (or blurry? but why?) with dust in her mouth, and her daughter’s name upon her lips, it is nothing new.