Work Text:
The war was over. Well, between the two worlds, at least. After far too long, with far too many friends lost, the bitter, protracted campaign that had begun ever since both Alpha Sage and her Omega counterpart had died was finished, an uneasy truce in its place. Despite the fact that the resolution to face their common enemies, the Scions of Hourglass in both worlds, had come, it had come at far too great, and far too pointless a cost. The numbers of both versions of Valorant had come down to about half, and the effect it had had was clear - being forced to kill exact replicas of your friends for good, while those exact replicas felled your own friends, took far too great a toll on the mind.
And for a mind that was already shattered and broken, only mended by the kind, electrically-charged soul of another, what even remained when the once-shining light of her beloved was permanently snuffed out? Fade had wished for death many times in her life, and even knowing all Neon would want her to do was live and find happiness rather than wallow and grieve and lapse into suicidality after her death, every time Fade closed her eyes all she could see was her smile. The way her eyes literally lit up when she was excited, or happy, and the way sparks would fly in between her pigtails when Fade managed to fluster her. To say she was suicidal would have been an understatement. She broke. And even though she was ‘saved’ from her attempt, told that Neon wouldn’t want her to throw her life away, she simply had nothing to live for. In the aftermath, she cried, oh she cried, but when the tears stopped coming, she found that she didn’t even wish for death anymore. There was just a hollow, empty, gnawing feeling, that even Nightmare was silent for. The very same Nightmare that had tormented her and gloated how right it was that any love could only end in tragedy for the unlovable Hazal Eyletmez, that at least Hazal was now free from attachment, the Nightmare that drove her to self-harm just for the slightest reprieve from its torment. She just felt… nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing.
The feeling persisted through the missions she went on during their all-out war with Omega to dwindle their numbers. Her allies fell around her, and she felt nothing. Her enemies writhed and shook as she slowly tortured them with her Nightmare powers, and she felt nothing. They retreated, they came out victorious, and there was nothing. Why couldn’t it be her to die? But there was no stray bullet to end her lifeless existence. In the place of Nightmare taunting her, torturing her, it was seemingly the universe itself that refused to give Fade the easy way out. And every time she went out on to the field, she would always be reminded in some way of Neon. Jett’s speed, the fears she saw in Omega Reyna’s mind of Neon’s death - even when assaulted by Reyna’s nightmares of losing Neon, the only thing she felt was the hole in her chest becoming darker, deeper, gnawing at any and all feelings she may have still had. An emotionless husk. No more tears left to cry - it wouldn’t surprise her, she had already cried enough to drown herself after Neon’s death. She would laugh at that thought if she could. It was wishful thinking.
Her colourful eyes, the blue and copper that Neon had adored so much, seemed duller and deader than Neon’s as she shuffled into Neon’s room after another goddamn mission. 3 dead for Alpha. 2 for Omega. “A tactical retreat,” Brimstone had barked through the comms. How tactical that the walking corpse was always given the opportunity to live, she thought. A that Fade had appreciated was that the Protocol had allowed her to use Neon’s room instead of her own after her demise. While it might have brought back memories too much to bear for some, Hazal was in denial of losing Tala, her first love, her only love even more so in her emotionless state. Fade would truly be dead if she had nothing to remember Tala by. The same went for Neon too, Fade thought.
“You live until you’re forgotten, right?”
Her own words echoed in her head, but she knew with each passing day, she was forgetting her brother too. The only way she had managed to get through his loss was with Tala by her side. With Tala gone too, the threat of the both of them being forgotten, Fade was almost glad to be an emotionless husk, too traumatised and broken to form any real emotion. If she broke again, there would simply be nothing left of her. Not that there was much left in the first place. At least there was something left of Neon, though. Her room, the projection on her wall, her stuffed Octopus, Squish-Squish… every night, she hugged the plush so hard that an onlooker might think it would break - but if she didn’t, Fade was convinced she would break instead. The thought of Neon’s room being stripped of everything unmistakably Tala was almost too much to bear at the time - keeping it as it was made Hazal’s pitiful existence that much more bearable. When she had reacted in panicked shock, with more emotion than anyone had ever seen her show at the notion, people looked at her as if she was crazy. But that was at least better than the stares so full of pity that she was given now, as if looking upon a fatally wounded animal. Even the wind girl, once so opposed to Fade herself and her relationship with Neon, gave her those same pitying stares, not daring to come closer, not wanting to disturb the fragile remains of Fade. Fade would have hated it all if not for the fact that she couldn’t feel a thing. At least that meant she couldn’t be scared of the fact that she couldn’t preserve Tala’s memory forever. At least she could delude herself into thinking this was the one thing she still had control over in her life. She had never felt more empty flopping onto the bed of the woman she had loved, the woman she had lost. An unbreakable dam had been erected in her eyes, stopping the mass of tears from ever flowing down her cold, pale cheeks. It was killing her. If only it could kill her physically, she thought as she closed those same eyes, heavy with tears impossible to shed.
The one thing Fade felt that she could be grateful for was the fact that she hadn’t encountered Omega Neon on the field. The thought of seeing her again, an exact mirror of her lighthouse in the bleak, nightmarish darkness, her little spark - it was already too much for her. In the form of a treasure she could never have, a precious treasure that hated her and her allies? While seeing her again may alleviate the greyscale tint her world had taken on, she knew her icy heart would finally shatter. Being forced to see the anger and hatred in those exact same brown eyes would kill her before her mirror lover’s lightning even got the chance.
Yet here she was, at the negotiating table of both Earths, setting out their joint plan going forward, finally noticing Neon’s Omega double staring at her from across the room with pure and unadulterated grief in her eyes, before turning away, trying to silence her heaving sobs. She had been head-down, staring blankly at her lap for the past hour, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, completely unmoving. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Omega Neon had been doing the same, yet not emotionless, simply attempting to suppress her wild emotions so that she didn’t cause a power outage, as she had done several times after losing… losing her . Fade caught her eye as if with a sixth sense, finally realising who she was in the room with. All at once, it came rushing back to Hazal. The world gained its colour. The sadness and despair erupted inside her as if it were a candle lit not with a match, but a flamethrower. The longing, the mourning, she felt it all in that instant looking at Tala. Not her Tala though. The thought wrenched at her heart. The tears, weeks in the making, began flowing silently, uncontrollable sobs soon taking over, redoubling as Alpha Fade and Omega Neon glanced at one another again. A moment of solidarity invisibly shared between them as they registered the other, knowing what had happened, knowing how much the other must be hurting . Their love for each other ran so deep, too deep - they were never really able to separate their lovers from their mirror counterparts, but now? It was too much to bear, even just seeing each other, far more than when they were expected to kill each other. Everyone else in the room pretended not to notice. Grief was already laden heavy in the room. They all knew the effect of the losses that were suffered, but to view it so laid bare like this felt wrong for them to look upon. Their pity for Neon and Fade overtook the room, yet the negotiations went on. Loss hung in the air already with the amount of empty seats, yet ignoring it now was a tall task with their hearts heavy for the two mourning lovers - while they knew the two would finally notice each other at some point, they were still unprepared for the sheer emotional display, a visual reminder of how much loss had affected both worlds. If anything, it spurred their leaders on further, determined to make their losses not in vain, despite how pointless they knew every casualty had really been.
The next thing Fade really processed in her uncontrollable emotional state was footsteps. She had registered that the remaining members of the Legion and the Protocol had left their new joint base for the teleporters to both Omega HQ and Alpha HQ, yet the steps past her had meant nothing, heard by her ears but not her brain, too consumed with trying to rebuild the emotional dam that had been completely destroyed not 20 minutes prior. She was so consumed by her own breakdown that the entire outside world was gone to her. Until there was one footstep. Two footsteps. Three. Four. But even then it was as if the thuds were just Neon’s name echoing in her mind. Tala. Nicole. Dimaapi. Valdez. As she fruitlessly wiped away at her tear-sodden cheeks, she caught a hint of blue in the corner of her blurry vision. Her nose caught the scent of vanilla, and the same shampoo she used to love smelling on Neon. Her Tala. Tala…
“Hazal?”
A shaky voice called out to her in the darkness, its tone soft, broken, almost inaudible, yet it pierced through Fade’s spiralling heart like a javelin. That same husky voice that had once brought her so much joy now ripped her from her mourning, her grieving for the owner of that exact same voice. She slowly lifted her face from her arms, which were still trying in vain to stop her sobbing, long sleeves now thoroughly wet with tears, blinking the salty liquid still flowing from her eyes away so she could perceive the form of her lover’s mirror.
The first thing to go through Hazal’s mind was how awful Neon looked. Her eyes were probably as red and bloodshot as hers, tears still leaking from them. Her signature pigtails were worn down with her hair completely dishevelled and unkempt, her usually golden nails were unpainted, and the Filipina was as shaky as her voice had just sounded. She looked like she hadn’t even been bothering to take care of herself in the slightest, a feeling Hazal could very much empathise with. Oh, how Hazal hated having the ability to feel again in that moment. Here the literal mirror image of her girlfriend was, looking worse than she had ever seen her, with such grief and despair clear in her eyes that Hazal would have done anything to dispel her sadness. But she couldn’t. This wasn’t her Tala, and wasn’t her place, considering the loss Hazal could now feel she had gone through. The fear and anxiety coming off of Neon was so great that Hazal could almost see it in her mind without even calling upon Nightmare, could literally see the smoky black and red tendrils coiling around the both of them almost protectively. But Nightmare wouldn’t touch them. Prowler mewled sadly in her mind at the display: Tala was her favourite person after all, and she had mourned her loss just as much as Hazal.
Once Hazal came to from her reeling mind, she sharply inhaled at the proximity, how close Neon was. It hurt her so much to see Neon like this, closed in on herself, hugging herself with her arms as she sniffled. Hazal had never seen her so small, so weak. Hazal just yearned to touch her, to hold her, to comfort her as she knew both of them needed. But Omega Neon being within touching distance just felt wrong. It opened up a well of despair in her chest she just couldn’t contain, so she turned away from Neon with new, fresh tears breaking out of her eyes.
“Tal- Neon. H-hi.”
Her words died in her throat, a hollow greeting all she could muster. What else could she even say? It still came off as if she were trying to pretend nothing was wrong though. An old habit. But that mask had long since slipped. She felt bad for coldly using Neon’s codename when Neon had called her Hazal, but the dream seer had to remind herself that this wasn’t her Tala. Her beautifully blue girlfriend. The exact same as the Neon in front of her. It tore her apart, just as it tore Neon apart to see the woman with the face of her girlfriend not using her real name. It was as if her girlfriend was finally gone - even if the exact same woman, give or take, walked the exact same Earth (give or take), she no longer had that girlfriend. A heart-wrenching reminder that Hazal just had to catch the reaction of. Even through her blurred peripherals, she still caught Neon’s pained reaction.
Neon somehow composed herself, though, and began to speak again. She was always strong, after all. Just not strong enough for her pain to lace every word she could ever hope to speak in this instant.
“Everyone else has l-left, y…” Her voice broke and cracked as she choked back a guttural sob, both women now refusing to meet the other’s eye. Neither would be able handle it, especially as Neon’s eyes weakly shone and sparked with a deep sadness. “Y-you know. We… we should g-go. Don’t worry, I-I didn’t notice the… the leaving until, until now either.”
Even as Neon tried to joke with her words, tried to look at Fade and smile to maybe lighten the mood, there was zero humour in her voice, the smile dead and hollow, not matching her eyes and more befitting an expression of pure suffering, as if Neon were not even joking for Fade’s sake, but for her own, to try to stop the long-broken dam of emotions that was now completely and utterly flooded.
Fade finally turned to look Neon in the eyes, the smile on the latter’s face flickering and dying as Fade beheld her. So much mutual pain, mutual suffering in their eyes that just promoted more tears to flow.
Fade shakily began to rise from her seat, but quickly found out that her legs would not support her, as if the weight of her grief weighed her down, threatening to sink her into the ground. So instead of walking off, or whatever she had planned - nothing except Neon was even in Fade’s vision, her thoughts at this point - she opted to flop down onto the floor behind Neon, back against the wall, her legs hugged against her torso as she buried her face into her knees, trying to wish the tears away. She didn’t think she could do anything except cry right now, truthfully, faced with the spitting reminder, the literal spitting image of Neon. Her first real friend. Her girlfriend. Her teammate. She was right there but at the same time she wasn’t. God, did it hurt. It hurt so much.
Neon just looked on helplessly, yearning to reach out, but knowing she shouldn’t. How she longed to comfort Fade as she once did, to prioritise her suffering over her own. She just couldn’t accept that Fade was gone. And so it hurt all the more watching Alpha Fade hopelessly stumble and collapse onto the floor right next to her, inconsolable.
Eventually, Neon settled for gently sitting down next to her, a distance between them. Truthfully, there could be no ‘comfortable’ distance between the two. The minutes became what must have been hours as the two sat there, close yet separated by reams of intangible distance. Mourning. Grieving. Sobbing. A splutter, an uncontrolled sob, a choked cry would occasionally echo out into the room, as if searching for the other soul that they knew would comfort them. The other soul that had since passed on.
When Neon thought there were no more tears in the world left to cry, she still did. She always did. And yet, her tears were momentarily stopped, surprise momentarily replaced her all-consuming despair. It was Fade to break the silence, to use her trembling voice to pierce the grief-stricken air taut and overwhelming in the room.
“Y-your version… of me, how- how did she…?” Fade’s voice initially broke, underestimating the amount of effort it would take to speak, how hard it would be both mentally and physically. Fade slightly lifted her head as she said this, allowing Neon, turning in the direction of her voice, to catch a glimpse of her wet and distant eyes between the two-toned locks of hair wildly covering her face.
After no response came from Neon but her averting her gaze again, Fade went to hastily fill the silence.
“You don’t have to talk if you- if you don’t want to, I…” She trailed off again, letting silence fill the air once more. Trying to wade through the swamp of their heavy emotions was clearly going to take a toll on both of them.
Neon took in a shaky breath, gaze firmly fixed to the floor as she opened her mouth, but no words came just yet. She stole another glance at Fade, who had somehow made herself even smaller, tucking her knees into her chest even more, her face not even visible beneath her tangled, messy hair. Despite her heart breaking all over again for the mirror of her girlfriend, it somehow gave her the strength to speak up.
“We were… we were on a mission. Together. And…” Neon cleared her throat once more, fixing her gaze on a very interesting blemish on the wall opposite as she spoke, as if that could stop her choking up from remembering the tragic death of her Fade. “And we had the advantage. We were defending since Alpha had made an incursion into our Earth off some intel. But we got taken by surprise. More accurately, I did, and Hazal… she- she took a bullet for me, killed one lurker and scared off the other with her powers…”
Tears were streaming down her face now as she furiously rubbed at her traitorous eyes, trying to force herself to recollect her girlfriend’s last moments as she hung her head low and curled in on herself, mirroring the woman to her right.
“She saved me, but she took…she took four bullets to the abdomen. There was- there was so much bl-blood all over her, and I went to hold her in my arms, to try to tell her everything would be fine, that we could get out, that we could live happily ever after. But… fuck, we… we both knew that was a lie.”
Neon shuddered as she spoke, but held back her sobs just long enough to finish. Talking about such a loss to someone who literally had to understand was cathartic, after all. If not bittersweet, considering it was Alpha Fade.
“She just shushed me and… with that dumbass smile on her face, she said “I love you, Tala.” Then… then she was… she was gone. It was so quick, so sudden that I just- I just snapped and hunted down the last Alpha agents to fry them. I don’t even… even remember who I killed. It felt so right, but I just felt so… hollow after. It wasn’t like taking revenge was gonna bring her back, you know?”
This time, Neon did let out an uncontrolled, guttural sob. Fuck , it hurt so much.
“My control over my powers had never been worse, and I later learnt that because of Omega Earth’s deterioration, my… fuck, my nanay, my tatay, they both were- they both were killed in the natural disasters that were happening a month earlier and ever since, I just…” Neon now slumped further back against the wall, not even bothering to wipe away her tears any more. It wasn’t like her being able to see clearly was even a priority right now. “I’m sure you can empathise with the loss of control, the feelings, the… everything, really.”
Neon looked up at the ceiling, trying to blink her tears away again. It was odd really, talking to a replica of your dead girlfriend about said girlfriend’s death. It filled Neon with so many feelings and amplified them tenfold. The comfort from the fact that she could technically see her again, the despair at the fact that it wasn’t really her, the grief they shared… it wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.
After a not uncomfortable silence between the two, the minutes passing by as they both processed their grief, Fade finally spoke up again. “Fuck, Neon… I- part of me hoped you were both alive, honestly, even after we pretty much thought your… your me had passed since we didn’t see her on the field again. If- if we couldn’t have a happy ending in our world, I wanted at least one version of us to… to make it, y’know?” Neither were looking at each other, but the grief was painted clearly on both their faces, equal parts an unknown guilt and a despair for their fates in both worlds.
“The universe is too cruel. Tala once had me convinced that I was wrong, that there was more light than darkness, given how brightly she shone for me… but I didn’t even get to… I never even got to say goodbye to my spark in the darkness. And now… now the dark is all I have left.”
Fade whispered the last part of her speech; it was barely audible, but Neon caught it. The hidden pit of suffering beneath. The hopelessness in her voice. She had had to listen out for all these little signals before. And at this moment, Neon could tell Fade was at her absolute breaking point, filled with a grief she’d shackled inside herself for months on end, never letting it rear its head.
“You never… you never got to say goodbye?” Neon choked out, hoping Fade didn’t mean what the sprinter knew she meant. But it was Fade after all. The universe could never be too cruel, too evil to one of its favourite victims, ripping even the slightest bit of happiness or comfort away from Fade after getting her used to it.
“Since the Protocol knew we were… we were in a relationship, we couldn’t go on missions together, and the last time I ever saw her was the morning before the mission, when we woke up together. I told her to be safe, and she promised she’d be back. So optimistic, so cheery to reassure me that I never even doubted her. But… I never even got to find out how she died. I was just… told and that was it. “In my best interests”, Viper said. At the start, Nightmare gloated, telling me I was finally free, but after I tried to…” Fade averted her gaze even further, burying her face in her knees, almost shuffling away from Neon a bit, somehow ashamed of admitting her suicide attempt in front of this Neon. “After I tried to end it, I just felt… nothing. An empty hollowness. A hole that- that she used to fill. Tala, I…”
Fade trailed off, unsure if she was trying to address her once-girlfriend or the mirror of her next to her, as she let out a broken cry, squeezing her eyes shut to try to desperately stop the new wave of emotions hitting her after bottling up her grief for so, so long.
In lieu of speaking, Neon just shuffled closer, now looking fully at Fade, not caring about her own tears streaking down her face. She knew that when her Hazal got anywhere close to this, she just needed time to recuperate and consolidate her feelings before she could continue. Some comfort from Neon would be a very welcome bonus, and oh, how she longed to just place a reassuring hand on her shoulder, or pull her in for a tight hug, as she knew Fade would need. It wasn’t her place, but seeing Fade this awful hurt her in so many ways. She was just so indescribably broken , and Neon didn’t know if anything could ever fix her.
“I- I loved her. I love her, and I just, I just can’t stand the thought of letting her go, of forgetting her, of letting her memory fade… every time a piece of her dies, a piece of me dies with it, and I can’t get them back. Her room becoming so much less Tala every time I enter it, her familiar, comforting scent evaporating… It hurts so much, and I was never ready to let her go in the first place. And now… fuck, why couldn’t it just have been me? She had so much to live for, so many friends, her family, but all I ever fucking had was her!” Fade was visibly shaking now, torn at the seams from the unstoppable avalanche of grief crashing out of her. “It’s not fair that I’m the one who gets to live. Who gets to see her friends look defeated over her loss. Why… why wasn’t it me?”
A quiet sob escaped her as her voice trembled on the last words. Neon knew she had meant them too. She knew of the distrust that most of Alpha still had for Fade years after the blackmail. She really did just have… nobody. Neon felt her heart break all over again at the realisation.
Seeing Fade like this, completely destroyed, nobody left for her on a cold conference room floor, made up her mind for her on what she was about to say next. She had no doubts. Fade did literally have nothing to lose, after all, and all Neon herself wanted to do in that moment was hold Fade close to her chest, stroke her hair, and… not tell her that everything was gonna be alright, but at least just comfort her. If this Fade needed her, she had her.
Letting the silence hold for a few moments more, Neon’s breath hitched, but she finally spoke up.
“What if… what if it didn’t have to be that way?” Neon breathed, shuffling closer to Fade, careful not to overwhelm her.
For the first time in a long time, Fade looked up, eyes completely red, bloodshot and sore, before averting her gaze again to speak.
“What do you mean?”
“There doesn’t have to be no trace of Neon left in her room, there doesn’t have to be nobody left for you, or for me. Most of my friends on Omega are gone, but… but there’s you. And you may not be my Hazal, and I may not be your Tala, but I think our girlfriends would just want us to be happy, you know?” Neon kept her voice even, if trembling a little, as she forced herself to at least look in Fade’s direction.
Fade briefly made eye contact with widened eyes, a glimmer of hope in them before it was snuffed out, looking down at the floor and hugging her knees to her chest once more.
“I- I miss Tala so much, but I can’t curse another Tala with… me. Especially like this. I don’t think, I don’t…” Fade trailed off, forcing herself to speak for just a few seconds more in spite of the heavy grief weighing down on her throat. “I don’t think either of us can survive the pain of loss again.”
“That excuse didn’t work on your Tala, did it?”
Fade let out a low, genuine chuckle at that, a small smile breaking out on her for the first time in what felt like decades. It felt so… foreign now to experience even a sliver of happiness.
Lifting her head again, the two gazed at each other, such looks of longing and pain in their eyes, and it just felt natural for the two of them to finally give in as they fell into a desperate embrace, their tears flowing freely once again, but not purely out of sadness this time.
Hazal held onto Tala as if letting go even the slightest bit would cause her to slip and fall from her grip, never to be embraced again, finding her head in the all too familiar warmth of the crook of Tala’s neck as she sobbed. Tala, through her tears of far too many emotions at once, finally smiled as well when she combed her fingers through Hazal’s two-toned locks of hair, feeling the dream seer melt more and more into her embrace with each stroke.
After what was in all likelihood a full hour, their breathing finally evened out, their tears, while evident on their faces and Tala’s shoulder, seemed to finally be all cried out and a sense of relief, of acceptance, of a kind of happiness washed over both of them. The two lovers, separated by worlds, pulled away just the slightest bit to look at each other, yet never once letting go.
“I-I missed her, I missed you, so, so much… I love you. I love you, Tala, I…”
Tala placed a finger to Hazal’s lips, knowing all too well what was to follow.
“I love you too, Hazal,” Tala’s voice almost a whisper as she spoke, “And I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here, right now. We won’t lose each other again.”
Despite the circumstances, despite everything , Hazal believed her, and fully embraced Tala once again, sighing happily into Tala’s loving warmth as she rested her eyes, heavy and sore from all the tears.
They weren’t replacing what they had lost - they were just picking up the pieces, healing. And somewhere far beyond the confines of their worlds, they hoped that their different versions could find happiness and solace in one another too, until they could find their other halves once again.