Work Text:
Lynx hated how sensitive they were.
It wasn’t in the ways of emotions, perhaps, like the way humans could, but they could sense things that went unnoticed by humans and most omnics alike. A subtle change in signals in the air, the rise and fall of energy, the intensity of sunlight, wind direction and speeds, the temperatures and subtle shift of clothing of every person that came into their vision.
Usually they were good at filtering out the unnecessary information, deleting it immediately and focusing on the more important pieces. Yet in the days leading up to the concert, the air became thick with various signals, the crackle of electricity pricking at their sensors on their head and the sound of thousands above the usual amount made them burrow themselves into the thick walls of their apartment to block out… well… everything.
But then Efi had given them a ticket, swindling a promise of at least trying to go to the famous DJ Lúcio’s concert. They enjoyed his music, the notes having a soothing and uplifting message in their design, but could they really survive attending with hundred thousand plus in the crowds?
They had tried to distract themselves from it all by hunting down their Russian friend, thankfully finding her on her medical leave in St. Petersburg. Yet she didn’t look any better than she had in the field. She looked… lonely, ugly couch and all. Too large for her the room she was sitting in that was sparse of much of anything. Sadness lurked in her green eyes, more prominent than ever as she found herself in solitude. They wondered if anyone else saw it, if anyone wanted to see it.
Zarya carried a weight greater than the armor she typically wore, bearing down on her back and dragging in every step she took. Many humans didn’t think omnics would know about emotions at this level, fooling themselves in thinking they couldn’t feel any of it. But it didn’t take creative use of programming to see that the tall Russian was hurting, even back in the old clips they had found of her weightlifting career. Every smile to the crowds was a haunting of something else, yet every article written about her said nothing, too enamored by the confident face she put on for them.
Zarya was strong because she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders so that few others would have to without a single complaint or cry for help, and no human, who had emotions etched into their very biology, saw it.
It was right then and there was Lynx decided that this travesty could no longer continue, extending the offer of the concert to the woman. They had been both surprised and not that she accepted it so easily, immediately leaving in favor of escaping whatever silent pain was chasing her heels.
Lynx didn’t want to say that they grew anxious, but there was no other term they could come up with that expressed what they felt. Every sensor felt taxed as the day to the concert arrived, Zarya arriving late with shadows lurking under her eyes but the faintest of smiles on her lips, and the airways filled with so much vibrations of voices and signals that all they wanted to do was rip their ear-like sensors off their head and stuff them into their coat.
They tried to hide the growing discomfort from their giant… acquaintance, keeping their hands tucked into the pockets of their coat and shoulders hunching in hope that the fabric that usually gave them something to focus on other than other physical stimuli failed to ground them as they stepped into the lines heading into the stadium, keeping quiet in fear that the metallic scratchiness of their overloading systems would appear in their voice. They could feel their internal workings humming against their hands in a frantic, fans trying to work double time as they try to process through the entire ocean of new data that continuously streamed through them, but they hoped that between their coat and the crowd their companion wouldn’t notice. Zarya needed this, needed to get out and experience something other than the war and her own troubles. They had seen the way she soaked up everything in Dorado even while on a mission, subtle glances at the colorful architecture and eyeing the various foods with interest. She needed something to take her mind off the things that plagued her, not worry over them and the stupid errors of their functionality and fragile upgrades as the endless flood of raw data threatened to tip them over into completely freezing.
They lasted until they entered the stadium, Zarya looking out for Efi and Orisa while everything became too much for Lynx. They couldn’t ignore nor delete everything, not at the speed as it was coming in. Every bump of someone’s shoulder against theirs jarred their internal networking, hyperaware of everything that was happening around them. The miniscule crack under their feet, the fleck of lint on the hem of the shirt in front of them, the conversation falling from the lips of those five rows up on the other side of the stadium, the thousands of phones and devices clogging the airways with every pip and tap of letters and pictures taken.
The hood of their coat was pulled over their head, the fabric jolting their sensors and blotting out most of the visuals other than the light filtering through the dyed fabric, cutting down that particular sensor down to a fraction of what they were taking in just seconds prior. Something thick and warm draped over their shoulders, rubbing the fabric and causing every other stimuli to become chaotic and disjointed in a blinding combination that had their internal workings hot and rattling in protest in attempt to figure out what was going on.
The warmth soon wrapped around most of their being, scraping the cloth of their coat against their sensors once again as their ears dug into something slightly giving, slightly firm. The overwhelming swarm of data was toned down by the sudden, rhythmic sound and the slight shifting of muscle.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
The words took some time to process, disjointed in their head as they gripped to the warmth around them, feeling the smooth texture of skin and hair under their fingertips, something liquid flowing gently underneath the thin surface that dulled the reverberating voices and signals that folded and repeated upon themselves. The voice was familiar, and yet they couldn’t process why, the eternal flow of information blotting out any access to their usual memory.
A song rumbled against their ears, in tune with the strange beat in their auditory. They eagerly tried to focus on that, hoping in vain to push down and ignore the other signals in trying to understand the pattern that was so close to them and yet so far away, threatening to be drowned out by the threatening rise of everything around them.
It was a heartbeat, the realization blipped by in the scramble of other nonsense data and information. The gentle, rhythmic drum of something alive, curled around them in attempt to shield them away from the rest of the world. It was a strange, odd sound, but one that had had a pattern, nothing like the chaotic jargon that filtered through every other sensor and rattled their internal workings like a flurry of moths in an attic.
Lyrics could be picked out in the sea of information, Russian of some sort that they could grasp on before the thought was drowned out by the signal of a phone call to Egypt and the metallic ring of an American quarter against the floor. In desperation they tried to focus on it, their processors gurgling and grinding as they tried to keep up. But it was getting worse, even without having any visual stimulation beyond the shifting of blues of the inside of their hood.
And then, suddenly, the threatening flood of data became almost muted, the steady heartbeat in their ears returning closer than they ever were before as they were wrapped up in comforting warmth, tucked into the slow songs of what they suddenly pinpointed as Russian folk music curled around their auditory detectors like a thick blanket.
They could count every heartbeat of the person- no, Zarya-, interpret the lines of every bit of Russian that left her lips, feel the movement of her mouth and exhale against the top of their head that heated and dampened their hood with the humidity of her breath.
The flow of unnecessary, overwhelming data sank into background processing as they focused on the everything that was around their immediate surroundings. Zarya blotted out most of it as if she was the moon in a solar eclipse, not muting out everything but casting enough of a shadow that they could fall directly into the umbra and savor the lull before the sunlight returned.
In the end, they grasped enough control back over their systems to shut them down into hibernation, every sensor cutting off in relief one by one to preserve their internal workings from any further damage their overload had caused them. They had never been fitted with an automatic safety switch for something like this, and they never really thought they needed one, always sure to focus on what needed to be focused on and ignore everything else. Yet Lynx wouldn’t need one still, not if Zarya was there to be their safety switch.
The last thing they sensed before Lynx fell into blissful nothingness was the quiet thrum of Zarya’s heart.