Chapter Text
The night air is cool as it brushes against the revenant’s skin, carrying with it the faint scent of leftover gunpowder, paint and rust. It had been a long day of training against that MAXBot, the rather annoying mechanical opponent Killjoy and Raze had put together for training. Nobody had come to clean up the mess left behind yet.
He breathed out a sigh, staring up at the star spangled sky. Five more hours 'till the sun rises, and four 'till the rest of the Protocol awakes. Some peace and quiet before the inevitable bullet storm of tomorrow’s mission ricochets all over his eardrums.
Being a dead man walking, he was no stranger to nightmares. Most of his nights were haunted by the pains of the past; reliving that horrific experiment, the blinding light of the explosion, being ripped apart at the seams of reality itself, his body and face twisting into the thing he is now. He was more or less used to it all, by now.
Yet, the thoughts that took hold of his dreams (and feelings) tonight were rather.. different.
That particular night, in the freezing, dry air of Icebox. Russian nights were darker, longer, and the only things illuminating the snow-blanketed facility were artificial, flickering lights.
He and Sova sat together behind a stack of some shipping containers, around a faint flame to keep them warm as they cooked their rations. It had been a long, messy fight against those Omega-world counterparts, and by the time the duo had finished cleaning up it had been hours since the sun went down. (Looking back at the dried up paint explosions behind him, he’s had enough of cleaning duty for now, Omen thinks.)
The two agents were occupied doing their own things; the hunter tending to his bow and arrows, and the revenant mending the bandages that had come apart in battle. Every now and then he’d snuck a look at those mismatched eyes, ever sharp and focused on the task at hand, and somewhere in the depths of his inhuman soul a tiny voice with human feelings wishes Sova would look at him that same way.
He silences it. Pushes it down. (Another ache to suppress.)
That was how the night was supposed to end. Nothing more than enjoying dinner together in silence with a coworker who merely tolerated him. Yet dreams don’t follow the flow of reality. The mind wandered and the heart yearned, manifesting desires in an imitation of the real world where things are a tablespoon kinder.
Then, the hunter actually met his face, and Omen was quick to shy away and cower under the shade of his hood.
“Do you need help with your bandages, Omen?” was apparently the hunter’s first assumption. “You’re awfully tense.”
“I’m fine,” he spoke, almost too quickly, head down to face the snowy ground that slowly melted around their campfire.
“Are you sure?”
Sova was already scooting closer to his side. That tiny voice spoke up again, that yearning for the warmth of human touch, Sova’s touch.
(It was only a dream anyways, Omen had thought. Lowering his guard down this one moment should be just fine.)
Slowly, he nodded. He turned his back to the hunter and lifted the tattered purple cloth of his hood up. Not enough to show the face that hides behind his mask, but just enough to get it out of the way of his wounded neck and shoulders. “There,” he had then muttered.
And that was the whole dream. His only desire; to be close to Sova, to trust him enough that he’d let down his armor around him, figuratively and literally.
That one dream has managed to disturb him more than any of his previous nightmares. These things he’s feeling towards Sova; this infatuation, this touch starvation, this clinginess—all so foreign to a ripped up heart that’s only ever known pain.
The more he pushes it down, denies it, silences it, the louder that voice screams, the tighter those strings pull at his heart.
How strange it is, to feel things more than just pain, hunger and regret. To feel a pulse again, a beating heart despite his dead body.
To feel human again.
So there the man was tonight, waiting for morning atop the breaking roof of their shooting range, dreaming of love.