Work Text:
Null Sector's leader attacks with its fighters, boosting and shielding them as it stands high, masked eyes pointed towards the Overwatch team sent to dispatch and defend. Five of them: Mercy, Tracer, Torbjörn, Reinhardt and Genji. Genji, red between a wall of blue and a sea of purple. He's the one diving in to chip and cut at the omnic forces. Retreats like a dog as he's called, topped up with the angel's staff. The battle is not easy but it is going well for them. The Null Sector omnics are not smart. They cannot compete with the wisdom of Overwatch veterans and the speed of the newly recruited. They cannot compete with his lifelong training and perplexing agility.
Until their leader lowers its staff. The omnic steps forwards, pulling its shoulders back as its mechanisms whirr. Metal unfolds and stretches. Feathers show themselves, gleaming metallic in the light of the moon. The wings are bigger than any one of them. Wider than Reinhardt's shield. The motors switch on, the fans spinning as the omnic bends at the knees, flexing its wings. The battle lulls. Time freezes.
He's perplexed, watching the way the metal quivers in the breeze, sharp as the breath that fills his lungs. The rest of his team are the same; everyone behind him is silent. He breathes like he's been shocked; a current forcing itself through what muscles he still has until they shake and stutter against their will. He stares at the fabled beast before him, in awe instead of terror. As if he wasn't born with two of his own. As if he didn't grow up touching clouds and donning the nickname that trailed him from below. Sparrow, they called him, even when his dragon was nestled heavy around his heart.
The omnic surges into the air. The battle spurs to life. Bullets skiff over hard light between hollers of commands. He sprints towards a building to scramble after its ascent.
A gift, some called it. A granted wish that tore his mother apart, ripping at her from the inside until they had to cut him out of her. Until she bled out on the blankets surrounded by the best doctors in Hanamura. A miracle his brother stole from him, severing them in two flavours of revenge. A wing for a sin. A murderer at age zero.
His astonishment morphs quickly into rage. Envy clouds his head and fills his mask. Lips twist and wrench at his scars as he bares teeth. He's an animal gnashing behind his muzzle. They spent so long rebuilding his body until he was barely functional, but they did not even ask him about wings. Routine maintenance and endless pain, real and not, gnarled him -- the wingless sparrow -- further and further from what he used to be. His body mutilated again and again. Suffocated in wire. Wreathed in metal. He was taken, remade, upgraded. Buried, dug up, re-casted. Mark seven, mark ten, mark fifteen. Manipulated beneath their fingers until he breathed satisfactory. But he is nothing without his wings. The estrangement of his clan barely compares. Take away a bird's name and it will find another. Take away a bird's wings and it is no longer one.
He snarls and spits, grabbing at the sword on his back as he leaps. Green frames his vision and the omnic is the centrepiece. Its head follows him calmly, cables twirling and eldritch and its wings solid. He dashes at it. His dragon sings between the crash of metal.
"So it is true." The omnic says, voice stirring deeply. Its wing blocks the strike, shifts back to keep the body afloat with huge and heavy flaps. Its hand swipes, its staff colliding with his sword, the force shifted at the last second to catch and redirect his unsupported weight. His sword goes wide, sliding off its shaft, and it's the perfect cover for his right fist to fly up, flicking shuriken. It flinches back, off hand crossing over its outstretched arm for them to embed into less important circuitry. The arm barely lowers. Its mask bores into his own. "The fabled Genji Shimada lives."
It manoeuvres perfectly, like it was the one born this way. Like he wasn't the beginnings of a fantasy; a human birthed with wings. Its limbs all work in tandem seamlessly. Flawlessly. An actor so good it instills the audience below with doubt.
"So too does your dragon. Strong like the southern winds." Its words are venom. Curled and sharp.
He draws back, pushing off the omnic towards a nearby building. On its wall he perches and rests for a half second. A diver on the edge of a pool, he kicks off and his dragon lifts his heart, lightens his body. He soars forward with sword pointed and face scrunched.
"But unfortunately..." The omnic hovers still and confident like a metallic angel. It thrusts out its free hand. A parasitic mass of nanites tosses forth, igniting in his path. His stomach drops like stone. "I have mastered them."
Genji falls. Plummets. His weight is tenfold. He has naught a single feather to stop himself.
His sight is filled with shrinking metal, seated in the air as it watches him die.
The hatred bleeds away like his brain knows there's no point anymore; instead, a wave of ignominy washes over him. Of course the thing to kill him would be the very things his gift gave him. The wind in his hair. The valleys and buildings he crosses. The people below, shouting and chanting his name. Waving at him. Running out of buildings to look up. To gaze at the marvel that was his existence. He can see it now in his mind's eye. Longing swells in his heart and disturbs his dragon. It retreats, petrified, and so does the green in his vision. Clearly now he can see the omnic, the leader of Null Sector, gazing with sheltered eyes.
The wind deafens him. He does not hear the screaming of his name from below. He does not hear the charging and rushing towards him. Instead, somewhere in the deep crevices of his mind, he can hear his father's voice: "Sparrow," it calls, light and followed with laughter, "you are doing so well! Look at how much you've improved." He closes his eyes and pictures the moment. His father is young and has less smoke in his lungs. "All those spins and swirls in the air; you've almost mastered it already!" He flexes his brown-mottled feathers. His father's pride widens his flashy grin.
He exhales and his sword slips from his hand. He misses the better days before his father's passing. Before he hid his grief with alcohol and before he sought comfort away from the family who would never give it. It always hurt how a stranger would listen to him more than his own brother. Then they wonder why he wouldn't listen to them. Why he would choose himself over the family that hates him.
He did not lose his clan, he did not lose Hanzo; they lost him.
And now, as he falls and falls and falls, as the seconds before death stretch into hours, he doesn't feel bad for it. Hanzo chose his own path. It was Hanzo's fault he killed his own. Not a child in birth. Not a grieving sibling, desperate to be heard.
I am innocent, he thinks as he opens his eyes again, sees the darkness of the sky, the scarce stars through layers of pollution, and I will stand alone beside myself.
I will die again, and I know I am not to blame.
His spine slams into concrete, his limbs following barely a millisecond after in an egregious and half-wet snap.