Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She woke up choking.

The world was white and blinding and wrong. Her chest seized like she’d surfaced from deep water too fast. A soft alarm beeped beside her. Something cool and sterile pressed into her arm.

Her body tried to move — she whimpered. Couldn’t. Everything screamed. Her ribs. Her side. Her face. A dozen burning points wrapped in bandages and medical gauze.

She blinked rapidly, vision swimming. Someone leaned into frame — a nurse, gentle voice, soothing in Korean.

“You’re safe, Lieutenant. You’re in the recovery wing.”

Safe.

The word echoed in her skull like a joke. Her hand jerked up, reaching for something that wasn’t there. 

A joystick. A trigger. A console. Control.

“Where’s my mech?” she rasped.

“Destroyed,” the nurse said kindly, clinically. “But you’re alive. You were lucky.”

Lucky. 

She almost laughed. 

Almost.

She stayed in the medical wing for eight days.

It was a quiet ward with fresh sheets, withered flowers, and a parade of cheerful lieutenants coming and going. Fan letters stacked high at the door. A holoscreen in the corner replayed “Best Of” Twitch clips from her streaming days like they meant something now.

There was no escaping the message.

Korea’s sweetheart is still alive. Still fighting.

They were always watching.

Every morning, she pressed her thumb into the tender bruises on her hand. Just enough pressure to hurt. A reminder she was still here. Still grounded. Still in her body. It didn’t stop the tremors.

The dreams came hard and fast. Flashbacks of smoke in the cockpit, the air too hot to breathe, sirens screaming in the distance. She’d wake up clenching the bedrail like it was her throttle stick, her breathing shallow and mechanical.

They said she needed time.

She didn’t have it.

MEKA’s top brass arrived on Day Six.

General Park walked in with his usual stiffness — uniform perfect, boots polished, face unreadable. Two aides followed, one holding a datapad. Commander Yuna trailed behind, tired eyes and subtle tension in her jaw.

Hana pushed herself upright in the bed, her back straight out of habit, one hand clutching the edge of the blanket tight.

Park got to the point.

“You’ll be listed as the mission’s critical success factor. Reports will credit your decisive response. The details of the mech failure have been classified. We’re working with press liaisons to control the narrative.”

Hana blinked.

“What about the signal glitch?”

“There was no glitch,” Park said without looking up.

Her jaw tensed. “There was interference. I saw something—”

“Static from the Gwishin pulse,” he cut in. “Unreliable telemetry. Nothing that affects the outcome.”

Yuna stepped forward, voice lower. “It’s not about hiding the truth, Hana. It’s about keeping the public stable. They need to see strength.”

“But you’re rewriting what happened.”

Park’s eyes narrowed. “You lived. That’s what happened. And the country needs to believe in that.”

He dropped a tablet on her bedside table. Prewritten press statements. Appearance schedules. A message of gratitude 'in her own words.'

That was it. No inquiry. No debrief. Just a story to read and a version of herself to perform.

They left without waiting for a response.

Only Yuna paused in the doorway.

“I know you think you saw something,” she said. “But sometimes the truth just... doesn’t help anyone.”

And she was gone.

Hana stared at the tablet. Her fingers twitched.

That night she didnt sleep. Staring at the tablet, picking at its rubber side. Dread for the upcoming return to the public eye.

Her first day back at base, the lights were blinding.

Hana squinted as the armored transport door hissed open, immediately engulfed by the harsh strobe of camera flashes. Dozens of media drones hovered just beyond the safety barrier, their lenses like glowing eyes, watching her every step.

She hated how loud the world had become.

Every shutter click, every flicker of light, sent tiny tremors up her spine. Her left hand — bandaged beneath the sleeve of her MEKA uniform — clenched, then unclenched at her side. She forced it to remain still.

Don’t shake. Not now. Not in front of them.

She stepped onto the tarmac, her boots hitting the ground in slow, cautious rhythm. The leg injury hadn’t healed right. There was a hitch in her walk, subtle enough to escape casual notice, but every step reminded her that she hadn’t come back whole. Yet her posture was perfect — chin up, shoulders back.

She waved.

Said nothing.

A cheer erupted from the gathered press. She flinched.

Reporters pressed against the railing, voices overlapping into a suffocating blur:

“Hana! How does it feel to return a hero again?”

“Can you confirm the MEKA unit was unprepared for the Gwishin?”

“Will you resume streaming? The fans want to see you—”

No one asked how she felt. If she still felt strong. Like this unstoppable force. If the pain had subsided, if the scars kept hurting, if the nightmares became easier to manage, if she stopped crying at night.

Just smile.

She did. Barely. Her lips lifted into something practiced and polite, but her eyes stayed distant — scanning the hangar, already calculating her exit path. The cameras didn't care about that. They never did.

Behind the crowd, towering over the base, stood her freshly repaired MEKA. Gleaming paint, clean metal, untouched. No scars. As if the flames never touched it.

They’d even fixed the decals. She stared at it, breath catching behind her ribs.

It’s not the same. I’m not the same.

She remembered the heat. The hiss of coolant lines rupturing. Her own voice in the comms. The robotic growl of the gwishin staring back at her. The smell of salt water and her heart thumping in her ears as she aimed her pistol at the reactor of her mech before blackout as she crashed against the ocean.

It looked like her MEKA.

But it wasn’t.

Neither was she.

The hangar doors shut behind her, muffling the crowd.

She stood in the hallway alone — the hum of fluorescent lights, the polished tile under her boots, and the faint whir of cooling fans from distant server banks. Every step echoed too loud.

No cameras here. No screaming fans. Just silence.

And that silence weighed more than any of the attention.

Her uniform itched around the bandages. She wanted to tear it off and crawl out of her own skin. Instead, she pressed her palm to the seam of her side — the one still sore when she twisted too far. The pain helped. A little.

Yuna hadn’t walked her in. No escort. No “Welcome home, soldier.”

She got a text instead.

[Yuna]

Debriefing access granted. Room B-7. Take your time.

A weird phrase.

Take your time.

Like anyone had ever given her that luxury.

She found herself drifting past the training simulators.

They were off — dark screens, dust motes swirling in undisturbed air. The squad must’ve been reassigned. No pilots. No techs. Just ghosts of her old self reflected in the glass.

She wandered into the locker room.

Her nameplate was still on the door: SONG, H. She slid it open slowly. Inside: her old bomber jacket. Her old headset. A tiny figurine of her old MEKA unit on the shelf — dusty and chipped at the foot. Her backup suit hung like a skin she hadn’t grown into yet. She sat down on the bench. Elbows on knees. Hands shaking.

She picked up a small rubber band from the edge of her locker. One of the cheap ones they used to tie off wires or bundle cords. Slipped it between her fingers and started stretching it. Thumb to pinky. Back again.

The motion helped. Not enough. But it was a rhythm.

She had nothing else.

A door creaked behind her. She tensed. Yuna stepped in.

“I thought I might find you here.”

Hana didn’t look up. “You say that like it’s a bad habit.”

Yuna offered a faint smile. “It’s not. It’s just… old.”

She leaned against the locker next to hers.

“They gave me a script,” Hana said quietly. “For the interviews. For the streams. Even for my thank-you post. I guess I’m not allowed to talk about what I saw.”

Yuna folded her arms. “I know it’s hard to accept. But public morale matters more than your memory of what happened.”

“So I lie?”

“You protect people. That’s the job.”

“No. The job was fighting monsters. Now it’s acting like one.”

The silence between them stretched thin.

Yuna finally exhaled. “When you’re ready… the debrief room is yours.”

She left.

And Hana sat there for a long time, just stretching the rubber band. The grooves biting deeper into her skin.

It didn’t make the shaking stop.

But she kept doing it anyway.

By now it had stretched far into the night. Time slipping away from her. Knees sore and tight from staying in the same position for too long. Joints cracking as she stood to her feet. She stayed quiet, noticing the silence had seemingly gotten heavier. Exiting the lockers to see the base deserted. The only sign of life being her in the hallway. She glanced to her right. Further down is the briefing room. Past that is her quarters.

Her teammates quarters. She knows she wouldn't see anyone else. Hana contemplated going to bed but the painful reminders and nightmares deterred her. Boots carrying her right, stooping at the first doors she came across. 

Yuna did say she could use it. Not specify at what hour.

The briefing room was silent. Hana sat slouched in the corner, away from the long table where the others used to gather. No one stayed late anymore — not like they used to. 

The only sound was the faint hum of overhead lights and the soft whirring from the console screen as she scrubbed through drone footage.

For the third time that night, she watched herself nearly die.

The video paused mid-explosion, the image frozen on the moment the mech detonated. Static rippled across the screen, distorting her mech’s outline. In that brief second, the camera had captured her silhouette falling — almost lifeless, faintly towards the bottom of the now famous image.

Her fingers trembled.

Her right hand wouldn’t stop trembling.

She let it rest on her thigh, then pressed her thumb against the edge of her boot. Her fingernail found the seam between plates and dug.

“Pressure. Focus. Here, not there,” she whispered, barely audible.

She’d read about grounding techniques. Something to remind you of the present. This one didn’t work. But it gave her the illusion of control, and some nights that was enough.

She rubbed the scar under her collarbone absentmindedly. The grafted skin was too smooth. Too new. It still itched beneath the uniform, like her body hadn't accepted it yet.

'You should be dead.'

The thought came uninvited, loud in the quiet.

'You should have died in that explosion, crushed beneath the weight of the waves. The only reason you didn’t is because—'

She didn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t.

Instead, she rewound the footage again and focused on a detail she hadn't noticed before: a flicker in the feed’s upper corner. A distorted signal spike. For less than a second.

That’s not... right.

She magnified it, slowing the frame to a crawl. There — just before the power core hit critical — a ghost signal had surged across the screen. Buried in static. Deliberate. Encrypted. Like something—or someone—had tapped the feed.

Not Gwishin. Not local interference.

Someone trying to erase something.

She sat up straighter, adrenaline sharpening her focus.

That’s when the door opened.

Footsteps echoed behind her.

Commander Yuna entered with a file under one arm and a coffee cup in the other. Her brows tightened slightly when she saw what Hana was watching.

“You should be in quarters,” she said.

“I’m fine,” Hana said.

The commander didn’t look convinced.

“There’s nothing in that footage we haven’t already seen. And that signal—”

“Was scrubbed from the official report,” Hana finished for her, eyes narrowing.

Yuna didn’t answer at first. “There are layers to this job, Lieutenant Song. You know that.”

“And some of them apparently include rewriting history?”

The words came out sharper than she meant. Yuna’s jaw clenched, but her voice remained measured. “You saved lives, Hana. Don’t start looking for reasons to make that count less.”

Hana turned back to the screen.

“It already counts less. Because they’re hiding what almost made it not matter.”

The briefing room was cold when she left it.

Hana didn’t remember how long she sat there watching the frozen footage. She didn’t even realize she’d been holding her breath until her ribs ached. The flicker in the recording — the anomaly, the interference — burned behind her eyes.

She slipped the tablet under her arm and walked out, her steps echoing down the empty corridors. The lights overhead flickered, motion sensors late to register her presence. Even the base felt tired.

Her quarters hadn’t changed. Neat, functional, and too clean. As if the room had been expecting someone else to walk through the door. Someone younger. Someone less broken.

She dropped the tablet on the desk. 

Sat on the edge of the bed.

The tremor in her fingers had worsened. She dug into her pocket and pulled out the same rubber band. Looped it between her fingers.

Pulled. Released. Pulled again.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

The rhythm had become a crutch, something she could predict. Something she could control.

But her body still betrayed her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw flames in the cockpit. Heard the static. Felt the unbearable pressure of the escape hatch refusing to open.

She should’ve died.

Sometimes she wished she had.

She blinked hard and looked at her reflection in the darkened screen of her personal holoset. Her face stared back, soft and framed by loose hair, eyes rimmed red. They’d let her keep the headset after the last repair. The paint on the side was chipped.

The Hana in that reflection didn’t look like a war hero.

She looked like a ghost.

The holoscreen buzzed to life with a soft chime. An unread message.

[Yuna]

Public expects you back tomorrow. Doesn’t have to be long. Just let them see you’re okay.

She stared at it. Didn’t reply.

Instead, she opened her old stream dashboard. Watched as the timer began ticking down toward morning. Toward the scheduled broadcast. The screen loaded like muscle memory — overlays, animated alerts, the last layout she’d used months ago. Cute stickers. Neon icons. A follower count that still climbed.

They didn’t want her.

They wanted D.Va — cheerful, unbreakable, victorious.

She leaned forward and tapped the mic icon.

Paused.

Turned it off again.

Eventually, exhaustion won.

Hana lay curled on the bed, headset still resting on her desk, the room dim but humming softly with standby tech. Her eyes fluttered shut against the quiet… and fell headfirst into the dark.

She was in her cockpit again.

But something was wrong.

It was too quiet.

No comms. No HUD. No Dae-Hyun in her ear. The lights on her controls blinked red — slowly, deliberately — like a countdown.

And her hands… they wouldn’t stop shaking.

She flexed her fingers, but they moved like they belonged to someone else. Sweat dripped down her temple. Outside, the horizon was a blur of water and flame.

Something moved in the shadows of the ocean floor — a towering shape, tendrils of steel and flame. A Gwishin. No — all of them.

They rose in waves, dozens, maybe hundreds, blotting out the sky and the sea with mechanical limbs and glowing red eyes.

She screamed into the mic, but no sound came out. Her voice wasn’t hers. She was slamming buttons, trying to move, trying to fire—

The controls sparked.

Everything caught fire.

The cabin filled with smoke, thick and choking. She pounded the hatch release.

Once. Twice.

It didn’t budge.

Her vision blurred as the smoke clawed at her lungs. Red lights spun across the dash — emergency override, failure, failure, failure. Sparks fell like fireflies inside her helmet.

Tendrils wrapped tightly. Metal on metal screeching. The Gwishin drummed with life. Red eyes staring through the glass. More and more beginning to pile on top. Twisting and breaking the mech. Pieces falling into the water below. 

There was no escape.

She was alone. 

No one to help. No one to hear her last moments. She'd die not even protecting the city. She'd had failed.

The fire grew louder.

The cockpit walls began closing in. 

Bending. Squeezing.

Like a coffin.

She reached forward — toward the glass — trying to—

Hana gasped awake.

Cold sweat plastered her shirt to her back. Her sheets tangled around her legs like restraints. She clawed them off, sitting up too fast, heartbeat like a drumbeat in her ears.

The room was still dark, but her holoscreen glowed with the countdown to her stream.

Five minutes.

She reached for the headset.

Paused.

Her hands were still shaking.

She clenched them, eyes unfocused.

The Gwishin weren’t here.

The cockpit wasn’t on fire.

She took a breath. 

Another.

Rubber band.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

And then she activated the stream.

The “LIVE” icon blinked in the corner of the screen.

Viewers poured in like a flood — tens of thousands in seconds.

The chat exploded:

omg she’s back!!

QUEEN NEVER DIES

D.VA STRONGEST GIRL

missed u sm 

new scars??? badass

look at her eyes. she’s not okay

She forced a smile.

“Hey, everyone,” she said, voice clear, confident — trained. “It’s good to see you again.”

More chat blur. Emojis. Subs. Confetti gifs.

The overlay pulsed with light. Everything felt too loud.

“I’m, uh… back in Busan. Still healing. But the doctors say I’m good. MEKA’s been amazing, and my team’s been holding it down. Love you guys.”

Her tone cracked slightly on “amazing.” No one noticed. Or they pretended not to.

She gestured toward her desk camera. “Let’s talk patch updates. There’s a new mech interface I’m testing, but—”

Her eyes drifted toward the chat window.

It had started to shift.

you okay fr?

you don’t look like you slept

why aren’t you with your team

they’re not telling us something

She cleared her throat. “I appreciate the love. I really do. But let’s keep things light today, alright?”

She queued up some footage — old mech battles, a clip montage she hadn’t updated in months. The screen showed her last Gwishin takedown. Her mech landing in flames. The hero pose. The freeze-frame.

She flinched.

That wasn’t how it happened.

The angle had cut out the crash. The scream. The failure.

It looked… clean. Scripted.

Perfect.

She sat there, watching herself on screen.

Her hands clenched in her lap, just off-camera.

“Truth is…”

She stopped.

The chat waited. Silent, as if holding its breath.

Her smile faltered. Not all at once — just a slight collapse in the corner of her mouth. A crack beneath the surface.

“I don’t feel like her anymore,” Hana whispered. “D.Va, I mean.”

The chat went still. No emotes. No cheering.

“I’ve been trying to be okay because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Right? Bounce back. Save the world. Smile for the fans.”

She looked directly into the lens.

“I’m scared all the time. I wake up feeling like I’m still down there, still burning. And no one talks about it. Not really.”

She reached off-screen. The rubber band.

Snap. Snap.

“And the worst part? I’m starting to think there’s more we’re not being told. About the Gwishin. About what happened to me. About what MEKA is hiding.”

A long pause.

Someone in chat typed:

...you okay, Hana?

She stared at that line.

Then ended the stream.

Cut.

Hana stood at attention in a small, windowless room — the walls lined with military-grade acoustic dampeners. 

Her old battlefield looked clearer than this room. At least explosions were honest.

Yuna paced in front of her, tablet in hand, fuming but composed — the bureaucratic version of rage. A single overhead light buzzed faintly above them.

“You weren’t cleared to speak on your condition,” Yuna said. “Or to speculate about classified engagements. Especially not live.”

“I didn’t speculate,” Hana replied, voice low. “I said I didn’t feel like her anymore.”

“You said MEKA might be hiding things.”

Yuna turned the tablet toward her. “Do you realize what that triggered? Two hundred flagged messages. Fifteen news pings. Even Soldier: 76 reached out.”

“That’s not my fault.” Hana’s hands twitched at her sides. She didn’t reach for the rubber band this time. “I didn’t ask to be their hero. I didn’t ask to be… this symbol.”

“No. You volunteered,” Yuna snapped. “You said you'd do anything to protect Korea. Your words. You’re the face of MEKA, and when you break down in front of a global audience, it doesn’t just hurt you. It hurts us.”

Hana turned her head.

“You didn’t see what I saw up there.”

“I’ve seen the reports.”

“Then you know they’re lying.”

The room went quiet. Cold.

Yuna set the tablet down.

“You have every right to be shaken,” she said, more softly now. “But if you start digging in the wrong places, you’ll make enemies that won’t care how many followers you have. Or how broken you already are.”

A long pause.

“You’re restricted until further notice. No streams. No missions. Psychiatric review pending. Effective immediately.”

Hana nodded slowly. “Copy that.”

She turned and walked out.

Half a world away, in a cluttered safehouse behind a fake arcade in Kuala Lumpur, a woman leaned over a flickering holoscreen.

Fingers moving fast, eyes faster.

She watched the signal again — the same frame Hana had found. The buried one. The one MEKA had tried to erase.

She rewound. Cross-referenced.

Ran a trace.

“Hmm…”

Encrypted feed. Modified frequencies. A botched cover-up.

“That’s not random. That’s deliberate.”

She clicked open another window: Hana’s aborted stream. On the center screen: a still from Hana’s stream. Her eyes lingered on the girl’s face before the feed cut.

“I don’t feel like her anymore.”

She watched it again.

Rewound. Played it back. Again.

Her eyes lingered not on the words, but on Hana’s eyes. The tremble. The vulnerability. The fury, barely contained behind the smile. Not performance. Not politics.

Real.

She tilted her head, humming softly.

“She’s breaking.”

Her lips curled into a smirk. Not cruel. Curious.

“You’ve changed, conejita,” She murmured. “Let’s see just how deep that goes.”

She pulled up to her feet.

“Time for a little vacation in Korea.”

Chapter Text

The sea shimmered like oil under the overcast sky, grey light stretching endlessly over the South Korean coast.

Sombra stepped off the ferry in Busan wearing the face of someone else. Her hair was long, dark, plain. A disposable identity — one of many. The forged visa chip in her wrist passed the gate’s scanner with a bored beep. No one noticed her. No one ever did when she didn’t want them to.

They never look at the quiet ones. Not when they're not making noise.

She moved through the crowded terminal with the kind of calm born from hundreds of infiltrations. One hand in the pocket of a soft coat, the other brushing the edge of her portable translocator. All her real gear had come in pieces via dead drops over the past week: portable repeater nodes, cloaking lace, a modified handheld to skim closed comms.

Korea was unfamiliar ground.

Too tidy.

Too bright.

Too patriotic.

And that made her uncomfortable.

Not because of any loyalty to Talon — her ties there were flexible, transactional at best. But because MEKA was efficient, organized, and secretive — and that always meant they had something worth stealing.

The Gwishin attack had only confirmed it. Sombra had watched the headlines bloom across the darknet like wildfire. 

“D.Va Downed in MEKA Catastrophe.” 

“Civilian Casualties Avoided, But At What Cost?”

Photos leaked and then disappeared.

Inconsistencies.

Memos with missing timestamps.

Censorship disguised as cleanup.

The moment they start erasing history, it means they’re hiding ghosts.

And Sombra? She was a ghost-hunter by trade.

Busan was too clean. Too proud. Neon signs blinked over polished roads, surveillance drones gliding overhead like dragonflies. MEKA’s presence was unmistakable. Military uniforms blended with transit cops and corporate liaisons. Every banner reminded you of national unity. Every broadcast spoke of sacrifice, victory, and strength.

And every shadow whispered: we’re hiding something.

That was why she was here.

After the Gwishin attack, the headlines didn't match the data trails.

One mech against a whole swarm? Half a city saved?

And the pilot walks away with only scars and silence?

No.

Someone cleaned up more than rubble.

And Sombra never trusted clean.

-

She had been watching for days. Sombra crouched under the lip of a service roof, her holoscreen dimmed to violet as she silently watched the feed scroll by.

MEKA’s outer surveillance was sharp but shallow. Surface-level defenses for show — they didn’t expect intruders who didn’t come through a terminal.

That’s your first mistake, she thought.

From here, she had a clear line of sight into several parts of the facility: training fields, a few hangars, and one very specific hallway. The one where Hana Song passed every morning on her way to debriefing.

She wasn’t what Sombra expected.

The hacker had known D.Va by reputation. Flashy, sugar-coated, cocky. The kind of fame addict who traded explosions for Twitch sponsorships.

But the Hana who walked these halls now… wasn’t that girl.

She was quiet.

Focused.

Tense like a drawn wire.

Her hands fidgeted when she thought no one could see. Once, she walked into the supply corridor, leaned against the wall, and just stood there for three whole minutes doing nothing but breathing, hand pressed over her ribs like she was waiting for something to hit her.

PTSD, Sombra had noted, eyes narrowing. She’s cracked under the armor.

But she hadn’t broken.

She kept coming back.

Kept going to briefings. Kept fixing her mech. Kept pretending. Moving through the halls of MEKA HQ, hair pulled back tight, uniform crisp, face unreadable. Nothing like the avatar Sombra remembered from streams and propaganda reels.

Gone was the cocky smile, the overplayed charisma, the girl who made war look like sport.

This Hana moved like a ghost in her own body — hollow-eyed and rigid, as if holding herself together took most of her strength.

And Sombra found herself watching longer than she’d meant to.

Why? You’re not a fan. You’re here for secrets, not soap operas.

But the longer she observed, the more it felt like watching someone about to do something dangerous — not because they wanted to, but because they had to. That edge between desperation and drive. The place Sombra lived.

And that was interesting.

That was dangerous.

Four days after arrival, Sombra made her move.

She slipped into MEKA’s underbelly through an abandoned maintenance line — a tunnel left over from expansion, half flooded, pitch-black. Not on any map anymore.

Her boots touched dry concrete. She stayed low.

The node she was targeting was part of the redundant surveillance network — old, dirty tech they barely used anymore. Which made it perfect. Easy to hide in. Easy to whisper through.

She crouched by the junction, popped the panel, and began wiring in the bug — a sleek, false capacitor with a silent handshake protocol. Once activated, it would give her a live window into the base’s non-secure traffic.

She was halfway through the install when voices echoed down the hall.

Two engineers.

She didn’t move. Let them pass. Just another shadow in a city built on secrets.

Then—

“You see D.Va lately?”

“Yeah. She’s not sleeping. You can tell. She flinches at loud noises.”

“Kid’s been through hell. You think MEKA gives her a break?”

“Doubt it. She’s a symbol. Symbols don’t get sick days.”

Their voices faded.

And Sombra blinked at the capacitor in her palm.

Something twisted in her chest — a strange, unwelcome flicker. Not sympathy. Not quite.

Recognition.

She sealed the panel and stood, vanishing back into the dark without a trace.

Not wishing to stay out long, the familiar feeling of her body floating briefly takes hold. Falling apart then rebuilding itself within her hideout. A vacant sky rise safe house Talon hardly used. She doubts they even remember the place as its never been brought up to her before. Just on Busans periphery.

Sombra reclined on a borrowed futon. About half a kilometer from MEKA HQ. The windows were tinted, the walls bare, the whole room stitched together from burner parts and wireless taps.

On the monitor before her, feeds flowed in like veins full of stolen blood — hallway cams, comm intercepts, voice prints.

And there she was again.

Hana.

Moving like a soldier.

Sitting in silence.

Flicking her thumb against her finger. Over. And over.

Trying to feel something? Or trying to stop from falling apart?

Sombra didn’t know. And she didn’t like not knowing.

She leaned forward, elbows on her knees.

“¿Qué te pasó, estrella?” she murmured at the screen.

What happened to you, star?

For a moment, she just watched.

Not for intel.

Not for leverage.

Just watched.

Sombra peeled her eyes away and continued to stare at strings of codes and files. Monitors open looking through the cameras as the other hand adjusted the filter levels on her terminal. The footage flickered slightly — MEKA’s network wasn’t perfect, but her tap held steady.

Not much to work with.

The MEKA pilots all on leave. Besides Hana. An idea popping into her head that practically made her holovids tremble with static before closing them together. With the base empty, that allowed her recon without fear of being caught. A sly grin spreads across her lips and the holovids disappear. She raises her hand, three fingers up, and brings them down to a fist. 

Her body rewiring itself into intangible code. Nothing but specks of purple light and glitchy noise. 

Always have a back up.

Materializing within the server room of the base. A place that felt like home along all the technology.

The hum of servers filled the empty corridor like a quiet, mechanical heartbeat. Rows of darkened monitors lined the walls — most sleeping, some flickering with late-night diagnostics. The entire base was half-asleep.

But not all of it.

In the subnetwork’s shadow layer, a parasite slithered.

Sombra perched comfortably in a virtual dead zone, just beyond detection. Her presence was invisible, her access lines buried beneath triple-masked proxy servers. MEKA’s security was polished but predictable — static patterns, outdated keys, sloppy permissions.

Amateurs.

She watched with clinical interest as Hana Song moved through the halls below. No entourage, no stream, no fanfare. She was in civvies — fatigues rolled to the knee, hoodie pulled over her hair. 

Her gait was quiet. Balanced.

Too quiet for someone who used to bounce down these halls like a sugar-fueled mascot.

“What're you doing, conejita?” Sombra murmured aloud to no one, tracing Hana’s path with a fingertip. “Did the spotlight break something, or did you finally learn to fight in the dark?”

Hana paused near one of the hangars. Looked around. Still.

Then—her head slowly lifted. Eyes directly into the camera lens.

Sombra blinked, quriking a brow.

Hana’s hand came up, deliberately. A small, oval-shaped object pinched between her fingers — a MEKA-issue tracker. The very same she planted.

She crushed it.

The feed cut out.

Sombra grinned.

“Well, well.”

This room wasn’t on any current blueprints.

Hana had found it during a tech audit two years ago — buried behind a false panel, disconnected from the secure command grid. A Cold War relic, practically analog. It was dark now, lit only by the blinking standby light of a portable holocomm station Hana had carried in herself.

She waited in silence.

Not pacing. Not fidgeting.

Her fingers, however, pressed tightly together behind her back — thumb to knuckle, repeating a grounding technique the doctor's had taught her in recovery. She didn’t think it worked. But it felt like it did, and that was enough to stop her hands from shaking. 

She wasn't allowed the rubber band.

I’m not scared. Not of her.

The air distorted slightly. Not a door. A phase shift.

And Sombra appeared, casually leaning against the wall, arms folded, like she’d always been there.

“You rang?” she said, mockingly.

“You left breadcrumbs,” Hana said flatly. “Sloppy ones.”

Sombra raised a brow. “You found me because I wanted you to.”

“You watched me for days.”

“And you didn’t report it. Not to MEKA, not to Overwatch.”

“I’m not loyal to either of them,” Hana said. “Not anymore.”

That made Sombra pause.

“Big words for someone who nearly died wrapped in a government-issued coffin.”

Hana stepped forward. “That’s exactly why you’re here. You know they’re hiding something. I want what you know.”

Sombra snorted. “You think I break into military networks just to leave care packages for war idols?”

“No,” Hana said. “You do it for leverage. For blackmail. So let’s skip the part where you pretend you don’t care.”

Sombra’s smile thinned. “You got sharper.”

“I got burned.”

The silence that followed was heavy.

Unspoken, but felt.

Sombra’s gaze drifted toward the holocomm, then back to Hana. “Why me?”

“Because you’re already inside. Because you’ve seen their secrets. And because you hate them.”

Sombra stepped closer, her voice dipping. “You don’t know me.”

“I don’t need to. I know you hate lies.”

That made Sombra really stop. The tilt in her posture, the subtle recalibration of her stance — someone seeing through her armor, however briefly, had caught her off guard.

Damn. She’s serious.

“You’re dancing on a knife edge, D.Va,” she said softly. “I could cut you open without lifting a finger.”

“You won’t,” Hana replied. “Because I’m more useful alive.”

The smirk came back, slower this time. Almost approving.

“I like this version of you,” Sombra said. “Less bubblegum. More bite.”

Hana’s expression didn’t shift. “Then help me tear the rest of it down.”

The portable holocomm screen blinked off with a faint click. Silence swallowed the room again.

Hana stood still.

Her pulse thudded too loudly in her ears, not because she was afraid of Sombra — she’d convinced herself of that. It was everything else. The lines she was crossing. The part of her that felt relieved to be doing so.

Her thumb pressed against the second knuckle on her left hand. Hard. Press, release. Press, release. Grounding.

The rubber band effectively confiscated during her physical check up. The bruising around her wrist evidence enough and Hana relented, explaining it and all rubber bands promptly removed from her vicinity. All she had left was what the doctor told her to do.

She turned for the door, breathing slow and even.

Sombra opened it first.

No dramatics, no fadeout.

She just pulled it open like a person, her posture relaxed, her presence still somehow thick in the air.

Hana followed her out into the corridor. Neither spoke.

The hallway was empty. Late. Cold.

Their steps echoed in opposite rhythms — Hana’s precise, mechanical. Sombra’s deliberately loose, near-silent.

The tension between them lingered, unresolved. Uneasy allies. Dangerous truths exchanged like contraband.

Then—

Step. Step. Another step. Not theirs.

Hana froze. Her hand instinctively moved toward her comm unit — too late. A silhouette rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway.

Dae-Hyun.

He looked surprised to see her, his expression shifting in an instant from tired curiosity to worry.

“Hana?” he asked, voice gentle but alert. “What are you doing down here?”

She opened her mouth to respond—

And realized Sombra was gone.

Gone.

No phase-out. No shimmer. Not even a shadow left behind.

Like she had never been there at all.

Of course.

“Just checking systems,” Hana replied. “One of the old backups had a flicker.”

Dae-Hyun nodded, slow. “You’ve been doing a lot of late checks lately.”

His voice wasn’t accusatory. Just careful. Too careful.

“Anything I should know about?” he asked, stepping closer.

Hana stiffened, smiling with more teeth than warmth. “Just being thorough.”

He studied her.

He always had that ability — not to read her like a lie detector, but like someone who wanted to believe her even when he sensed something off. And that made it worse.

“You’d tell me, right?” he said. “If something was wrong?”

She looked at him for a moment. Really looked.

Dae-Hyun — her friend, her lifeline. Her link to the version of herself that used to smile on camera, talk in memes, play pretend like war was just a harder version of a video game. That version still existed for him.

And she couldn’t bear to break it.

“Of course,” she lied.

He gave her a soft smile. “Alright. Just... don’t burn yourself out, yeah? We already came close to losing you once.”

You already did, she wanted to say.

Instead, she nodded.

He passed her, heading toward the hangar.

When his footsteps faded, she stood there.

Alone.

And the truth hit her all at once, like a breath she hadn’t been allowed to take for days.

She didn’t even know she was walking until she was back in the room.

The door clicked shut.

Then it was just her. The dark. The silence.

Her fingers started shaking again.

The grounding didn’t help this time.

She reached for the panel on the wall and slid down against it, hugging her knees, breath catching in her throat.

What the hell am I doing.

She had just conspired with someone who should’ve been an enemy. Who probably still was. She had lied to the only person left who treated her like she wasn’t broken.

And worst of all?

She didn’t regret it.

She was relieved. Relieved that someone was finally listening, even if it was a hacker with more ghosts than past addresses.

She buried her face in her arms and let the sob slip out. Not loud. Not dramatic.

Just quiet.

Painful.

Honest.

A release she hadn't allowed herself since the Gwishin attack.

I’m not who I was.

I don’t think I can go back.

And for the first time since the harbor, the tears came.

She didn’t wipe them away.

She didn’t fight them.

She let the weight settle.

And in the hollow stillness of that empty room, the first crack in the new mask of D.Va split open.

The room was dim.

Only the soft glow of monitors lit the space, reflecting off Sombra’s face in pale, shifting colors. A half-eaten protein bar sat untouched beside her elbow. She hadn’t moved since she watched Hana almost stumble into her room.

The feed was back.

Sloppy of Hana, if it was a mistake. But maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe she knew Sombra would be watching.

Maybe she didn’t care.

The camera—one buried in the corner of Hana’s quarters, near the ceiling light—was angled just right to catch her from above. The room was sterile. Empty. A military standard-issue bunk. A folded uniform. One plastic flower in a glass.

No trophies? Did they rip that away from her too?

...

Maybe she got rid of them.

And her.

She sat on the edge of the bed. Still. Too still.

Then her hands began to shake again.

Not the controlled tic this time. Not the thumb-flick.

This was raw. Full-body. Like something inside her finally snapped its grip.

She bent forward. Elbows on knees. Her face crumpled and buried in her palms. Her shoulders shook. No sound reached the mic, but Sombra didn’t need it.

She was crying.

Sombra watched.

Not out of cruelty. Not even strategy.

Out of something… colder. Older.

That same recognition, maybe. Something she thought she’d left behind.

You finally cracked, estrella.

She leaned back in her chair, arms folded, eyes flicking between Hana’s trembling form and the flat, impersonal room she broke down in.

No one came in. No one checked. No alerts, no handlers.

They left her alone with this.

Like it didn’t matter.

Like she didn’t matter.

Is this what they do to their heroes?

Sombra’s jaw flexed.

She hadn’t signed up to care. She wasn’t here to play savior, and she sure as hell wasn’t here for empathy. But watching Hana shatter—not in battle, not under fire, but in silence—pulled at something Sombra buried years ago.

Something fragile. Ugly.

Human.

She tapped the console, isolating the video feed, encrypting the footage.

She didn’t delete it.

Didn’t look away, either.

“Why aren’t you hiding this?” she whispered to the screen. “Are you showing me? Or did you just stop giving a damn?”

The girl on the bed curled tighter, like she was trying to fold herself out of existence.

Sombra watched a moment longer.

Then, almost against her will, she reached for her keyboard.

Not to send a message.

Not yet.

Just to open a new folder.

She labeled it:

Subject_017: H. Song — Unredacted

And stared at the screen long after Hana stopped moving.

Chapter Text

Three days.

No contact.

No cryptic glitches, no cheeky emoji-laced warnings buried in her HUD, not even a scrambled ping from a bugged channel.

Hana stared at the blank corner of her holophone where Sombra’s encryption used to linger like a phantom watermark. She hated how easily she noticed the absence. How it made her anxious.

And worse — how it made her doubt.

Maybe Sombra never planned to help.

Maybe she was just playing.

Maybe she saw too much and decided Hana wasn't worth the risk.

She clenched her jaw and pushed the thought away.

MEKA had finally reinstated her streaming privileges — under strict conditions.

No references to the attack.

No “unauthorized commentary” about her condition or recovery.

And a written apology.

The statement had been fed to her in a sterile briefing room:

“The incident has been deemed a psychological reaction stemming from post-operative confusion. Cadet Song accepts responsibility for breaching protocol and confirms her commitment to healing, discipline, and continued service.”

A lie.

Wrapped in duty.

Sealed with the taste of ash.

Still, she agreed.

Because staying visible was safer than disappearing.

And she needed to look normal.

So, she streamed.

The lights were bright. Her makeup was perfect. The overlay showed a bubbly new theme: Back Online! Let’s Rank Climb Together!

Her voice hit every practiced note of enthusiasm.

The camera had been on for less than five minutes, and already her palms were damp.

She smiled anyway. That high-energy smile that used to come easy.

Now it felt like a rubber mask pulled over a bruise.

“—and I’m so excited to be back with you guys!” she chirped, aiming her voice at just the right pitch. “Thank you for all the sweet messages. I’m doing better, really. It was just… a weird time. But I’m stronger for it, promise!”

The chat flew by with cheering emotes and hearts.

One message stuck out:

you’re brave, d.va <3

She swallowed hard.

It wasn’t bravery. It was survival.

And even that was beginning to feel thin.

Every gesture was rehearsed, her posture rigid.

When she noticed her hand trembling slightly off-camera. She pressed her finger into her knuckle. Three deep breaths.

In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

It didn’t work. It never really did.

But she did it anyway — ritual as control.

And when the first glitch appeared, she was almost grateful.

A sliver of real in a sea of performance.

It wasn’t long before the glitches picked up speed.

Just a flicker, at first — a tiny delay in her facecam, one frame where her eyes turned static-purple before snapping back to normal.

Then, an emote in chat:

Two skulls and a purple heart in the middle.

She kept going. Pretended not to notice.

But it happened again — a flash of static in her overlay banner.

This time, unmistakably Sombra’s skull.

Hana stopped mid-sentence, eyes narrowing.

“Uh, hang on guys. Little tech issue. Be right back!”

She cut the stream.

Her holoscreen went black for a heartbeat — then blinked back on with a new interface.

Sleek. Purple-lined.

A private encrypted chat, known only to her and one other person.

The message was waiting:

'Got your apology. Adorable.

Ready to do some real damage? Meet me in an hour. Location pinned.'

A map flickered onto the screen — the outskirts of Busan.

An abandoned metro line. Sublevel access only.

Hana stared at the glowing waypoint.

Her thumb hovered over the reply key.

Then she set her jaw and stood.

The rain started just after sundown — not a drizzle, but a steady, whispering downpour that softened the edges of the compound and blurred the city lights beyond the wire-topped walls.

From the window in her room, Hana watched the droplets slide down the glass like falling stars. She counted them. One. Two. Seven.

Lost track. Counted again.

Her hoodie lay folded on the chair. A civilian one. Nondescript. Slightly too big in the sleeves. She tugged it on slowly, fingers trembling as she zipped it halfway and pulled the hood up.

The silence pressed in.

No pings from Dae-Hyun. No new comms from command. Just her heartbeat, steady and loud.

She slipped her streamer gloves into the side pocket — not for show, but habit. Even if she wouldn’t be seen. Even if tonight, she wouldn’t be Hana Song, the public darling.

She was just Hana now.

And she wasn’t sure who that was anymore.

She hesitated at the door.

Every step felt like crossing a line. Not just from her room to the hallway, but from who she used to be to whoever she was becoming. Someone who trusted a Talon hacker more than her own command.

Someone who lied with fluency now. Someone who kept her pain close to the chest and her truths even closer.

She cracked the door open. The hall was dark, only the red emergency lights casting long shadows. Patrols didn’t pass this corridor for another nine minutes — she'd memorized the route. Timed it out with precision.

Her boots barely made a sound on the floor.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Down the hall. Past the storage bay. Past the mech hangar, where her rebuilt unit stood dormant — watching her with dead eyes.

She didn’t look at it.

Outside, the rain hit harder.

She kept to the shadows, ducked low, weaving through the outer access path toward the utility gate. Her keycode still worked — barely. No one had thought to deactivate it.

Maybe they didn’t believe she had it in her to disobey.

The gate clicked open with a sigh. Rusted. Slow.

She stepped into the night, the rain instantly soaking through her sleeves.

But she didn’t run. Didn’t flinch.

She let it fall.

A kind of penance. A small, cold reminder she was still here. Still moving forward.

Somewhere in the distance, a pulse of violet light flickered near the metro access point. Sombra’s signal. Quick. Coded.

Hana didn’t smile.

She just lowered her hood, closed her eyes for a beat…

Then walked straight toward it.

The metro access point looked like a forgotten scar beneath the city’s skin — overgrown, half-collapsed, a rust-stained utility door hidden behind fencing and broken signage. The lights overhead buzzed faintly, dimmed by years of neglect and filtered now through a curtain of rain.

Hana ducked beneath the arch, boots skimming puddles, and pulled the door shut behind her.

Silence, save for the tapping water and the dull hum of her own breath in the dark.

Sombra wasn’t there.

Of course she wasn’t.

Sombra was.. Sombra. Intangible.

Hana leaned against the wall and slid down into a crouch, the rain still clinging to her clothes. Her knees curled in, arms wrapping tight around herself.

She told herself she didn’t care. That this was fine.

But the truth sat sharp behind her ribs.

What if Sombra changed her mind?

What if this was all just a game?

What if she was being played like everyone else — used, studied, discarded?

She thought of Dae-Hyun’s voice, how warm it had sounded earlier that day when he brought her spare parts she didn’t ask for. The way he still looked at her like she was whole. Like she could be saved.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know she wasn’t sleeping. That she flinched at the sound of metal tearing. That sometimes, when she blinked, she still saw her mech cracking open, the sea flooding in.

He didn’t know about Sombra.

Didn’t know that Hana had chosen to walk into the dark on her own. That she’d lied to everyone just to be here.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Her thumb against her knuckle again.

She stopped halfway through the third tap.

A breath hitched in her throat.

Her eyes burned.

She blinked fast.

“I’m not weak,” she whispered.

“I’m not.”

Thunder rolled far above the tunnels — muffled, distant, but real.

And then, just beneath the sound… a crackle.

Faint, electric. Almost like static.

Hana’s head snapped up.

From the corner of her vision: violet light. Brief. Like a flicker of recognition.

Then silence again.

She stood slowly, eyes adjusting to the shadows.

A shimmer in the air near the tunnel mouth. A distortion in the damp.

And then — Sombra stepped into view, phasing in like a ghost pulling herself together from code and mist. She didn’t speak right away. Just stood there, watching Hana with an unreadable expression.

Raindrops clung to her shoulders. Her hair slightly damp. The skull on her belt flickered once before going dim.

A beat passed.

No smile.

Just the sound of the rain behind them.

“You’re late.”

“You’re annoying,” Hana shot back. “Nice to see some things haven’t changed.”

Sombra clicked her tongue. “Someone’s grumpy.”

“You ghosted me.”

“I was watching,” Sombra said, glancing meaningfully toward Hana’s holopad. “Liked the little meltdown you had when you thought I bailed.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I'm hilarious, actually.”

Hana crossed her arms, stepping into the faint light of a utility lamp. She looked thinner, sharper around the edges. But her gaze was hard — locked and focused.

“Did you bring me here to gloat?”

Sombra cocked her head.

“No. I brought you here because you’re stubborn, loud, and apparently just reckless enough to be useful.” She paused, then added: “Also because you’re the only one who looked at the truth and didn’t blink.”

They stood in silence a moment.

Somewhere deep in the tunnel, water dripped.

The hum of dormant power lines echoed faintly through the walls.

The air grew colder the further they descended.

Concrete gave way to rusted iron. Water pooled beneath their boots, and every footstep echoed too loud, too sharp. Sombra led the way without hesitation, her cloak dimming around her shoulders, skinlit by flickering code as she interfaced with old utility nodes.

Hana followed, slower. Eyes scanning. Hands clenched at her sides.

She could feel her heartbeat in her fingertips — a fast, stubborn rhythm. Like it wanted to break out of her chest.

She flexed her fingers, then tapped the edge of her thumb to her middle knuckle three times.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

It didn’t work.

Not really.

But it gave her the illusion of control.

“You always this quiet?” Sombra asked from ahead, voice bouncing back toward her.

Hana didn’t answer right away.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

She swallowed. “I had to make that public apology.”

Sombra slowed. Turned.

Hana took it as a sign to continue.

“For the breakdown. After the last stream. MEKA said it was a recovery issue. Miscommunication. Psychological instability.”

Her voice was flat, but her eyes said otherwise. “They wrote the script. I read it. If I wanted my platform back, if I wanted them to stop watching me like I might snap again… I had to comply.”

Sombra raised an eyebrow. “And you did?”

“I need to look fine. Normal. Like the damage didn’t touch me.”

A faint scoff. “That’s cute.”

“I’m not cute.”

“No,” Sombra said quietly, “you’re not.”

They kept walking.

The deeper they moved into the subline, the more the space turned feral. Utility junctions overgrown with cables. Half-functional relays sparking low voltage into the air. A drone skeleton lay half-submerged in a trench, eyes blank. Burned.

Sombra crouched beside a rusted control terminal. Pulled out a cable and jacked directly into it with her gauntlet.

Data shimmered across her screen. “MEKA’s got some old ghosts down here,” she murmured.

“Find the archive?”

“Almost. They hid it behind a dummy diagnostic tool — it reroutes when pinged from the outside. But from here?” Her fingers danced. “It’s vulnerable.”

Hana hovered nearby, watching. Not breathing.

Her vision blurred for a moment. The cold walls of the tunnel flashed white — and suddenly she wasn’t in the metro anymore.

She was underwater.

Alarms blaring.

Mech splitting open.

The hiss of pressurized seals tearing loose —

The scream of metal — the scream in her throat —

“Hana.”

A voice cut through the fog.

Sombra.

“You okay?”

She blinked. Realized her fists were clenched so tight her nails had broken skin. Her shoulders shook — barely, but enough.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying.”

“I said I’m fine!”

Sombra didn’t push.

She just looked at her, long and steady, until the screen chirped.

“Found it,” she said. “Come see.”

They walked without speaking at first.

The tunnel sloped down in a slow spiral, the walls slick with condensation, the air growing colder with every step. Old maintenance lights flickered overhead — not enough to see clearly, just enough to make the darkness feel alive.

Hana’s boots scuffed against the damp floor. Her hoodie clung to her shoulders.

She kept glancing sideways at Sombra, half expecting her to vanish again.

“You always pick places like this?” Hana finally muttered. “Or is this a special kind of creepy just for me?”

Sombra smirked, hands in the pockets of her coat. “You’re the one who wanted discretion. I deliver.”

The tunnel opened into a shallow maintenance bay — half-abandoned, filled with rusted control panels and discarded cable. At the center sat a low, flickering holoprojector — likely one Sombra had wired in herself. It painted the walls with faint lines of violet code, pulsing slow and steady like a heartbeat.

Sombra knelt beside it and began tapping commands into a portable pad.

“I started combing through MEKA's old internal drives. Ones they thought they deleted,” she said. “Your people are tidy. But not that tidy.”

Hana crossed her arms, not sitting. “Find anything?”

Sombra looked up at her — not with her usual snark, but with something quieter. More curious.

“A few names that shouldn’t be there. Ghosts. Redirected money, scrambled R&D tags, assets that were supposed to be long gone.” She paused, then added, “Some of it links to Talon. Not directly. Not in the way that makes anyone panic. But enough.”

Hana’s jaw clenched. “So it’s true.”

“You already knew that.”

“I needed to see it.”

Sombra nodded slowly and stood. “You could still walk away.”

“I won’t.”

“You should.”

“I won’t.”

Her voice echoed in the chamber, too loud against the metal.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Sombra’s eyes softened, just barely. She tapped the pad again and the holoprojector shifted — showing a wireframe of a MEKA facility schematic, overlaid with corrupted data logs.

Hana leaned in. “Where’s that?”

“Back sector of your main base. Beneath the mech workshop. Restricted, even for high clearance.”

“I’ve never seen this.”

“Exactly.”

Sombra paused before closing the pad and tucking it away. She glanced over again — more thoughtful this time.

“You’re not doing this for Overwatch,” she said. “Not for justice, either.”

Hana looked away, silent.

“You want something else.”

“I want the truth,” she said finally.

Sombra didn’t push further. She just logged it — mentally filing away the fact that Hana’s reasons were personal, tangled, maybe even dangerous.

They stood in silence a beat longer, the flicker of the projection casting soft light between them.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” Sombra said.

“Hard to when the walls don’t feel safe anymore.”

That, at last, got a genuine expression from Sombra — not quite sympathy, but recognition.

She gestured toward the far wall. “There’s a bench. You want to sit for a minute?”

“I’ll just—” Hana started to say, but her knees buckled slightly as she tried to move. The adrenaline had kept her going longer than she thought.

Sombra caught her elbow before she hit the ground.

“Okay. Sitting it is.”

They settled — awkwardly — on the edge of the bench, the only real furniture in the room. Hana sat hunched, her shoulders shaking faintly, though whether it was cold or something else, even she didn’t know.

Sombra watched her.

Didn’t speak.

Didn’t smirk.

Didn’t vanish.

She just sat there beside her, quiet.

And sometime later — when Hana finally fell asleep with her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around herself — Sombra shifted her coat off her shoulders and draped it over her.

The holopad blinked once, prompting for a log.

She almost sent something.

Almost.

Instead, she just stared at the screen.

Then turned it off.

The water was rising again.

The cockpit groaned, metal warping inward as if it were breathing — drowning. Her pulse thundered in her ears. There was shouting in the comms, but it was garbled, distant. Her fingers fumbled for controls that didn’t respond. Her HUD blinked red warnings. The glass spidered.

Her mech tore open.

She screamed.

And then—

Hana shot up, a choked breath ripping from her throat.

She was in the metro hideout.

Not underwater. Not inside a dying MEKA unit.

Her chest heaved with the force of waking. Sweat clung to her skin. A faint buzz still rang in her ears like the echo of a scream. Her hands trembled.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Her thumb pressed against her knuckle once. Twice.

She stopped on the third, staring down at herself.

A black coat draped over her shoulders.

She blinked, still disoriented. The scent of ozone and artificial lavender clung faintly to the collar.

Sombra’s.

But the hacker was gone.

Hana’s breath slowed, though her hands remained clenched. The low light of the hideout painted long shadows on the walls, and from the far corner, she noticed a dim glow — purple and gold flickering faintly.

Quiet, she stood and padded toward the source.

Sombra sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the holoprojector, surrounded by tools, screens, and a mess of wires. Her hair was tied back now, a soldering pen in one hand and her pad in the other. Code streamed across one of the nearby displays. Her brow was furrowed in focus.

Hana lingered in the doorway for a moment.

“You pace like a wounded mech,” Sombra said without looking up. “If you're gonna sneak, try to be less obvious.”

Hana exhaled, more breath than laugh, and stepped closer. “Didn’t know I needed stealth just to get up.”

“You always need stealth. You never know who’s watching.”

Sombra finally looked up, eyes scanning Hana’s face for something unspoken. She didn’t comment on the dark circles beneath her eyes. Or the trembling that hadn’t fully stopped.

“How long was I out?” Hana asked, voice raspier than before.

“Few hours. Long enough for me to do all the hard work.”

She gestured to the display now showing a layered schematic of the MEKA sublevel — multiple access points, patrol routes, timing logs, and camera nodes already tagged and disabled.

“You did all this while I was asleep?” Hana asked, astonished.

“I’m efficient,” Sombra said with a wink, then turned serious. “We’ve got a window opening tonight. Narrow, but clean. It’s now or never.”

Hana’s heart skipped. “Tonight?”

Sombra nodded. “Unless you want to wait for another systems rotation in… nine days, maybe? Assuming no sudden changes.”

Hana stared at the projection, her mouth dry.

She wasn’t ready.

She thought she would be. Thought this would come later.

But the ghosts still clung to her. The nightmare felt too close. Her skin buzzed with static, like the trauma hadn’t finished playing out.

“You okay?” Sombra asked.

The question was casual. But her eyes — too observant, too precise — didn’t miss the subtle panic building in Hana’s frame.

“I just…” Hana rubbed her arms, trying to ground herself. “I thought I’d have more time.”

Sombra leaned back on her hands, watching her. “Time’s a luxury. Especially when you’re chasing ghosts.”

Hana’s gaze dropped to the ground.

“I don’t know if I’m ready,” she whispered. “I still… I still hear it. The metal. The water. Every time I close my eyes.”

Silence.

Then:

“Do it with your eyes open,” Sombra said, her voice low but not unkind.

Hana looked up.

“Fear doesn’t go away,” Sombra added. “But it gets quieter when you move through it.”

There was a beat between them. Something softer — not quite understanding, but not judgment either.

“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Sombra continued. “But if you’re in… we need to move soon.”

Hana swallowed, nodding once — slow, but firmer.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Sombra smirked, but didn’t tease. She simply turned the projector’s brightness up and started walking Hana through the plan — movements precise, clear, focused.

And beneath the fear, Hana felt something else begin to build.

Resolve.

As Sombra turned back to the holomap and started explaining the patrol timing, Hana stepped away for a moment. Her hands still buzzed faintly — from the dream, from the plan, from the way her chest hadn’t stopped tightening since she woke.

She fished her holophone out of her jacket pocket.

8 missed calls.

11 unread messages.

Her gut dropped.

Most were from Dae-Hyun. The rest — a few from Yuna, and one flagged as MEKA Communications: Report Timestamp Required.

She tapped into Dae-Hyun’s messages first, hesitating just long enough to let guilt crawl in.

Dae-Hyun: hey, everything ok?

Dae-Hyun: saw the weather was bad, you headed out?

Dae-Hyun: just checking in, saw you weren’t on the base floor after debrief.

Dae-Hyun: Hana?

Dae-Hyun: you’re not answering. please say something.

The last one was sent just over an hour ago.

She moved to Yuna’s.

Yuna: where did you go??

Yuna: you’re not ghosting again, right?

Yuna: are you okay?

Yuna: commander asked about you too. you said you were staying in tonight.

Hana’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. Her mouth was dry. She could lie — say she’d gone to clear her head, needed air, didn’t realize the time. But would that make things worse if someone started checking surveillance logs?

Hana’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. Her mouth was dry. She could lie — say she’d gone to clear her head, needed air, didn’t realize the time. But would that make things worse if someone started checking surveillance logs?

Sombra’s voice cut in behind her. “You’re not very good at sneaking if your phone’s blaring your absence.”

Hana flinched, startled. “It’s nothing. Just—Dae-Hyun. And Yuna.”

Sombra stepped closer, glancing over her shoulder. Her expression darkened slightly when she read the texts. “Your mechanic boyfriend seems worried.”

“He’s not—” Hana cut herself off, flustered. “He’s just… always checking on me.”

“Mm.” Sombra’s tone was unreadable. “You gonna lie to him, or do you want help making it convincing?”

Hana hesitated. Her thumbs hovered.

“They’ll worry more if I don’t say something.”

Sombra tapped her pad and sent a short burst of code. A moment later, Hana’s phone pinged — an auto-fill suggestion had appeared in her message draft.

Hey! Sorry, stepped out to get some air and clear my head. Holophone was on silent. All good, promise. I’ll be back in the morning. Just needed space. <3

Hana blinked. “You wrote that?”

“Sounds like you,” Sombra replied. “Just enough concern, not enough to raise a flag. Plus a heart emoji. No one suspects people who use those.”

Hana stared at the message. She could hear Dae-Hyun’s voice in her head — worried, soft. Yuna’s too, probably pacing the common room waiting for her to return.

Was this who she was becoming?

The girl who lies to her best friend. Who lets guilt sit like a crack in her chest and ignores it because the truth might cost too much.

Still, she hit send.

A moment passed. Then two.

Her phone vibrated. A reply from Dae-Hyun.

Okay. just glad you’re okay. get some rest, alright? we can talk tomorrow.

Hana locked the screen. Her reflection stared back at her — pale, exhausted, and not sure if she even recognized herself.

“You all good now?” Sombra asked, already turning back to the mission prep.

“I don’t know,” Hana murmured. “But I guess I have to be.”

Sombra paused just a second longer than usual before nodding. “We move in thirty. Gear up.”

Hana tucked the phone away.

And left her normal life behind — again.

Chapter Text

The room had grown still.

Rain whispered softly against the windowpanes of an old maintenance outpost outside the metro tunnels. Its metallic drip like a metronome ticking down to the moment they’d leave. The city outside was just a blurred ghost through the fogged glass — Busan breathing quietly in the distance, unaware of what was about to stir beneath its surface.

Sombra hunched over the holographic map, fingers tapping through overlapping security layers like a pianist working through a complex composition. Every now and then she murmured to herself in Spanish, noting pulse frequencies, guard rotations, camera timing.

Hana sat cross-legged nearby, back against the wall, freshly dried hair still curling slightly at the ends. She stared down at her gloves, fingers twitching inside them. She wasn’t shaking — not yet — but it was always there now. Waiting. Like a mine under her skin.

She flexed her hands and then tapped her fingers against her knuckles. In rhythm. 

Tap. Tap. Tap

Sombra glanced up.

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?” Hana asked, not looking up.

“The drumming. Like you’re playing the world’s tiniest concert on your knuckles.”

Hana forced a faint smirk. “Better than puking in a trash can before the mission.”

“Mm. True,” Sombra replied, not unkindly. She folded the electronic map shut and stretched with a groan. “All right. We’ve got exactly thirteen minutes until the patrol shifts. After that, we’ll have a fifteen-minute blind spot to slip in through the utility tunnels under MEKA Sector 3.”

Hana nodded, biting her lip. “What’s the margin of error?”

Sombra tilted her head with a mischievous glint. “Oh, probably three minutes. Give or take. That’s assuming we don’t get pinged by any security drones or that they haven’t updated their encryption since the last time I broke in.”

“…That’s not comforting.”

Sombra smirked. “You want guarantees? Stay home and stream K-pop reactions.”

A beat passed. Then Hana exhaled a laugh — the first real one in days. It was short-lived, but it felt good.

Her eyes drifted to her holophone, still dark. She knew Dae-Hyun had stopped texting after her message, but guilt lingered like a bruise she couldn’t press without wincing.

Sombra leaned back beside her, drawing a datachip from her belt and rolling it between her fingers. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

Hana looked at her, surprised. “You’re the one who agreed to help me.”

“Sí, but I’m used to walking into flames. You’re still putting down the matches.” Sombra turned the chip over, voice quieter. “You could go back. Say you got spooked. Tell your friend the storm got worse and you stayed at a hotel. Still time to tap out.”

Hana was silent for a long moment.

Then she shook her head.

“I need to know the truth,” she said softly. “About MEKA. About what they’re hiding. If Talon was involved in the Gwishin raid, if we’ve been fed propaganda just to keep the war machine going— I can’t go back to pretending. Not anymore.”

Sombra studied her carefully. “You sound like someone I would’ve tried to recruit five years ago.”

“I’m not doing this for your cause.”

“I know.” Her voice softened. “That’s what makes it interesting.”

A quiet beat fell between them. The hum of the outpost’s old lighting system buzzed faintly overhead. Somewhere beyond the building, a drone passed, whirring against the rain.

Hana tightened her gloves. “We should go.”

Sombra stood smoothly, slinging her kit over one shoulder. “Try not to get shot. It’s hard to repair someone with that much spark in them.”

Hana didn’t answer. She just took one last breath, stuffed the fear deeper into her chest, and followed Sombra into the rain-soaked Busan night.

The tunnels were darker than Hana remembered.

Old emergency lighting pulsed dim red every few meters — a rhythmic heartbeat echoing off concrete walls. Water dripped in slow intervals from above, pooling across the uneven floor as they moved through narrow service corridors that hadn't seen use since before the Gwishin raids. The air smelled of rust and wet metal.

Their footsteps were silent. Sombra had activated a low-hum cloaking shroud around them both, bending the edges of their forms like warped glass in the dark. It didn’t make them invisible, but it softened them into shadows — just another flicker in the dark if someone was looking the wrong way.

Hana kept her back straight, breathing shallowly through her nose. Her gloves were damp. She couldn’t tell if it was from rain, sweat, or the nerves threading their way through her spine.

They moved in silence for a while, following the route Sombra had burned into her retinal HUD. Every thirty seconds or so, Sombra would tap the side of her head — either signaling a network ping or adjusting her feed. Hana tried not to watch her too closely.

But her stomach twisted.

She had lied to Dae-Hyun. Again.

Just a text. “Spending the night at the safehouse. Don’t worry. Will explain later <3”

It hadn’t stopped the messages from coming — short, increasingly worried ones. Yuna had left a few too, asking if she was okay. Asking if she'd be on stream again soon.

Hana hated herself a little for not replying. She hated herself more for thinking: If I do, I’ll go back.

Back to pretending she was okay. Back to smiling for cameras, toeing the party line, apologizing for the screams she let loose when her body finally gave out. Back to being the good soldier. The face of the war.

No. She wouldn’t go back.

“Left turn,” Sombra whispered.

Hana blinked, dragging herself back to the moment. They reached an old junction — a wide, rust-covered hatch pried open just enough for one of them to squeeze through at a time.

Sombra went first, slipping through like vapor. Hana hesitated a second longer, staring into the darkness.

She still wasn’t used to this — the quiet. The absence of radio chatter. No command officers barking orders. No friendly IFF signals. Just her and Sombra, buried under layers of government concrete and secrets.

The silence roared louder than gunfire.

“You alright?” Sombra’s voice floated back. No sarcasm this time.

Hana nodded even though Sombra couldn’t see. “Yeah.”

She followed.

The next stretch narrowed — no wider than her own shoulders, the ceiling low enough that Hana had to duck slightly. Pipes ran along the sides, thick with condensation, and some still vibrated faintly with energy flow. The glow of Sombra’s HUD pulsed faintly ahead of her like a guiding flame.

She whispered, “You’ve done this before.”

“Broken into a highly classified military installation with a K-pop star turned mech pilot?” Sombra replied, grinning over her shoulder. “Nope. First time.”

Hana exhaled a nervous laugh. “You’re really annoying.”

“Si, but you’re still following me.”

Another stretch of silence fell between them. The only sound now was the slow drip of water and the dull whir of distant generators.

Then Hana’s voice, softer: “Do you ever wonder what you’d be doing… if you hadn’t gotten dragged into all this?”

Sombra was quiet for a long moment.

“Sure,” she finally said. “Then I remember that I wasn’t dragged. I walked in. Eyes open.”

A beat.

“Do you regret walking in?” Hana asked.

Sombra stopped walking.

She turned around slowly, her eyes faintly glowing violet in the dark. “Do you?”

Hana opened her mouth. Closed it.

She didn’t answer.

Sombra nodded, like that was enough, and turned back toward the junction. “Come on. The next checkpoint’s thirty meters ahead. No turning back now.”

They reached the final access tunnel.

Above them, embedded in the wall, was the maintenance hatch Sombra had marked earlier — a forgotten vent panel that fed into the sublevel of MEKA Sector 3. The grate was old, partially rusted through, and shielded behind a security sensor that now blinked a dull amber thanks to Sombra’s earlier override.

“Alright,” Sombra murmured, crouching and drawing a faint purple outline in the air, tracking digital fields only she could see. “This is the point of no return. Once we’re through here, the cloak won't help. The closer we get to core access, the more their systems will scream.”

Hana stared at the grate above them.

It looked like nothing. Just a piece of old metal. But on the other side of that wall were answers — and danger. Not the kind you could shoot or dodge. The kind that dug in like roots. Secrets. Betrayal. Everything MEKA might be hiding… and everything Talon might be trying to expose.

Her hands were shaking again.

She balled them into fists inside her gloves. Still shaking. Her nails bit into her palms. Breathe in. Breathe out. Her old routine: tap thumb to each fingertip in order — one, two, three, four. Then again. Then again. Her therapist had said it was grounding. It didn’t really work.

But it gave her something to do.

“You good?” Sombra’s voice came low and surprisingly soft.

Hana nodded. Too fast.

Sombra didn’t buy it. She tilted her head. “You don’t have to prove anything, chica.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Isn’t it?”

The tunnel fell quiet again. Just the echo of a distant vent fan and their own breath.

Hana looked up at the panel again. “I just… I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

Sombra leaned back against the damp wall and shrugged. “Fear’s fine. Fear keeps you sharp.”

“I’m tired of being sharp. I just want—” She broke off. Frustrated.

Sombra’s eyes softened. She nudged Hana’s foot with her own boot. “Then take a second. No one’s timing you.”

That surprised her.

In all the tension and adrenaline, she hadn’t expected kindness.

They waited in silence. Just long enough for Hana to slow her breathing. Just long enough to let the quiet sink in.

Then Sombra stood, graceful and fast, and gestured toward the hatch.

“Ready to make some noise?”

Hana forced a grin she didn’t quite feel — but it held steady this time.

“Let’s make it count.”

Sombra smirked. “Now that’s the D.Va I’ve heard so much about.”

And together, they stepped toward the breach.

The hatch gave with a groan of strained metal.

Hana climbed through first, her body tensing with every creak of the old grate. The space inside was tight — a vertical shaft barely wider than her shoulders, dusty and lined with forgotten wiring. Sombra slipped in after her, sealing the hatch behind them with a quick pulse from her hacking spike.

"Security sweep loops in thirty seconds," she whispered. "We have a window of twelve to reach the duct and slide in before it pings again. Don’t trip anything.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” Hana muttered.

Their ascent was fast and silent, Sombra guiding them like she’d mapped the entire building by muscle memory. The shaft opened into a low service duct that ran over a hallway lit by sterile white lights. The hum of security drones buzzed somewhere below, robotic voices issuing routine commands in flat Korean.

“Section 12-C scan complete. Thermal clear. Proceeding to next grid.”

Hana pressed herself against the metal and watched them roll beneath like ghosts.

It hit her then — the strangeness of it. Crawling through vents, ducking surveillance, evading her own base’s defense systems. She’d trained here. Slept in these barracks. And now she was breaking into them.

Her breath caught.

What if they catch us? What if they find Sombra? What if this gets her killed?

“Hey,” came Sombra’s voice beside her, softer now. “You’re drifting.”

Hana blinked. She’d frozen.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” Sombra replied, tone unreadable, “but you will be.”

They reached the duct exit, a grated panel looking down into a dark data relay room — blinking servers and cable nests, humming with the energy of MEKA’s inner systems. Sombra tapped a feed into her visor and nodded.

“This is it. Internal node. Backdoor access. All the files they think they buried? They route through here before going dark.”

Hana exhaled slowly, her heart kicking harder against her ribs. “And Talon knows this exists?”

Sombra’s mouth curled at one side. “Only me. Talon doesn’t like to share.”

With a practiced flick of her wrist, Sombra disabled the panel and dropped into the room below, catching herself with a silent roll. Hana followed, landing hard and crouching low as Sombra raised two fingers.

"Hold."

A red sweep passed overhead — one of the automated sensor arms tracking heat signatures. Sombra tapped her spike into a server port, slicing through firewalls like butter.

“There,” she muttered. “Now give me a second…”

Her eyes flickered. She was elsewhere now — mind inside the system, dancing through code like a wraith.

Hana stood guard, her hand on her sidearm — even though she hadn’t carried live rounds since the accident. It didn’t matter. She needed something to hold.

She watched Sombra work: calm, confident, almost graceful in how she moved across the terminals, fingers never quite touching, only guiding energy.

Then—

A spark. A flicker.

The screens around them began displaying fragmented feeds. Glimpses of black-bag projects. Project RAYOK. Gwishin recovery units. Thermal imaging of Seoul’s underground tunnels. 

And something that made Hana’s blood run cold:

A Talon signature, embedded into a MEKA file route. Old. Deep. Hidden like a parasite.

“What… the hell is that?”

Sombra’s eyes narrowed. “Exactly what you wanted to find. Proof MEKA’s been making deals it shouldn’t.”

The air felt thinner. Hana’s heart slammed in her chest.

Then—

A noise.

A click behind the far server wall. Too distinct to be a system error.

Sombra’s head snapped up. “Someone’s here.”

Hana moved instantly, ducking behind one of the cabinets just as the side door cracked open.

Bootsteps. Two of them. Flashlights cut across the dark.

Sombra vanished in a shimmer.

Hana pressed herself against the cold steel, her breath shallow, pulse spiking. She could hear the guards now — voices muffled, muttering about strange logs and corrupted server access. 

They didn’t see her. Not yet.

She risked a glance.

Hana froze, barely breathing.

From behind the server bank, she could make out the silhouette of two figures entering — both dressed in maintenance fatigues, not armor. Not patrol. Her heart leapt, then dropped.

One of them was Dae-Hyun.

She almost gasped but swallowed it back, pressing herself tighter to the cabinet. He wasn’t here on patrol — he had a toolkit in one hand, a diagnostic scanner in the other.

He was talking low, casual. The other man nodded along, holding a blinking tablet.

"Sector 3 had another voltage irregularity," Dae-Hyun muttered, crouching beside a relay. "These old thermal cables weren’t rated for the latest update. They overheat every few weeks now."

"Should we replace them?"

"Wish we could. MEKA doesn't want downtime. Not unless it’s a full system failure."

Hana’s pulse pounded in her ears. Of all the people. Of all the times.

She wanted to call out. Say something. Crawl out from the shadows and tell him the truth — that she wasn’t okay, that she was scared, that she was doing this because she had to.

But the words clung to her throat like wet ash.

What would he say if he saw me like this? In the dark. With her. Spying on our own base?

She squeezed her eyes shut, hands curling into fists.

Across the room, the faint shimmer of Sombra’s cloaked form hovered near the ceiling, crouched on a high beam. Watching. Calculating. Her violet eyes barely visible — trained not on the guards, but on Hana.

Hana didn’t know if she was judging her… or waiting to see what she’d do.

Dae-Hyun tapped the server with the butt of his wrench and shook his head. "Should hold another few days. If we get another system freeze, maybe they’ll actually let me replace the wiring."

The other man chuckled, and the two gathered their tools again. Hana barely exhaled until their steps faded, and the service door clicked shut behind them.

She collapsed back against the server, silent.

Her hands were shaking.

Sombra dropped from the rafters a moment later with barely a sound.

“You knew him,” she said. Not a question.

Hana nodded, forcing herself to steady her breathing. “He’s… my friend. My mechanic. My—” she cut herself off. “He shouldn’t have been here.”

Sombra studied her, unreadable. “You almost panicked.”

The air crackled between them.

“I’m not used to being scared of my friends,” Hana whispered. “I used to trust them. I used to believe in what we were fighting for.”

“And now?”

She looked up at her. Eyes burning. “Now I’m crawling through shadows with a Talon hacker and hiding from the one person who always believed in me.”

Sombra tilted her head. “You didn’t have to follow me into this. You asked for the truth.”

“I did. And I meant it.” Hana stood straighter, wiping at her face quickly. “I just didn’t think it would feel this heavy.”

For once, Sombra didn’t smirk. She looked at Hana — really looked — and for a moment, something almost gentle passed across her face.

“Come on,” she said, voice lower. “Let’s finish what we started.”

The decrypted archive flickered to life.

A low hum reverberated through the sub-level, drowned only by the drone of fans and servers around them. On-screen, strings of data scrolled — timestamps, coordinates, engineering schematics. 

Hana leaned over the console, trying to make sense of the interface while Sombra’s fingers danced across the keys like a concert pianist in command of an unfamiliar instrument.

“This section of MEKA’s archive was sealed three months ago,” Sombra murmured, narrowing her eyes. “Top-level encryption. Someone didn’t want anyone poking around in here. But that only makes me more curious.”

Hana said nothing. She stared, focused, silent — not even breathing.

Click. Click. A file opened.

Schematic data filled the screen: weapons systems, energy readings — not just for MEKA units, but adaptations. Small icons littered the margins: Talon insignias hidden deep in code signatures, recycled stealth technology with origin metadata scrubbed, only traceable through sub-layer hashes.

Sombra froze.

Her voice lost its edge. “This is Talon tech… repurposed into MEKA drone prototypes. But not for defense. These are preemptive strike specs.”

A chill crept down Hana’s spine. She couldn’t look away.

Her breath caught as a second tab loaded — a live test feed from a month ago. A facility not far from Busan. A simulation drone using the exact same loadout she’d seen from the Gwishin attack that nearly killed her.

She took a step back.

MEKA knew.

MEKA had known.

“I—” Hana started, but her throat closed.

The oxygen in the room thinned. Her vision swam. Dae-Hyun’s voice from earlier, soft and familiar, echoed in her head like a memory gone sour.

“These old thermal cables weren’t rated for the latest update.”

“He shouldn’t have been here.”

The edges of her vision blurred. The screen pulsed like it was alive. Her knees trembled.

“Hana?” Sombra’s voice was wary.

But it was too late. The dam burst.

“I trusted them,” Hana choked out. “I defended them. I stood on stages, smiled for cameras, told the world we were the good guys—” Her voice cracked. “And this… this thing that almost got me killed, that destroyed my squad—was ours. Was them.”

Her knees hit the floor before she even registered it.

She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking slightly, barely holding in a sob that threatened to rupture her ribcage. The mask she'd worn — the brave face, the fight-through-the-shaking hands, the smile on stream — crumpled.

Sombra stood frozen.

She hadn’t expected this.

She knew how to break systems. She knew how to pull strings, expose secrets, short out a camera feed from halfway across the globe. But this? A girl sitting on a concrete floor, unraveling — not from pain, but from betrayal?

It wasn’t her game.

Sombra took a step forward, then stopped.

Another step. Then crouched near Hana — not touching, but close enough for her presence to register.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked quietly.

Hana didn’t answer. She just shook her head, fists digging into her sleeves.

Sombra sat down — legs crossed, silent. Watching. Waiting.

The space between them wasn’t wide, but it held all the tension of a cracked fault line.

Eventually, Hana’s breathing slowed. Her knuckles loosened. She didn't look up.

Sombra reached into her coat, fidgeting with the material. Unsure of what to do. She didn’t say a word. Then she leaned back against the wall, head tilted to the ceiling.

“You’re stronger than they think,” she said softly. “That scares them more than anything.”

There was no witty flourish, no grin.

Just truth.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty — it was shared.

And for the first time, they weren’t just hacker and soldier. Not Talon and MEKA. Not spy and pawn.

Just two girls. Sitting in the dark. With nothing left to hide.

The silence settled like dust.

The whir of old servers and the low electric hum of forgotten tech lingered, but Hana barely registered it. She hadn’t moved since the breakdown. Her arms still clutched around her knees, forehead resting on them, eyes raw but dry now.

Sombra didn’t speak. She hadn't left. She hadn’t looked away, either.

Her holopad buzzed softly against her wrist.

She glanced at it — an incoming notification, masked under multiple firewalls, but urgent. Her surveillance net had flagged a shift in patrol patterns near the skyrise district. Their window was closing.

Her lips pressed together. She hated this part — the moment where survival forced emotion back into the shadows.

She crouched again, this time a little closer.

“Hana,” she said softly.

No response.

“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but… we need to go. Now. Before someone realizes we were here.”

Still nothing.

So Sombra reached out — slow, deliberate — and placed her hand over Hana’s.

A beat passed.

Then, Hana shifted. Just enough to let Sombra's fingers curl around hers.

She didn’t speak. Didn’t pull away.

She just… let her.

And that was enough.

Sombra stood, pulling Hana gently with her. Not forcing — just guiding. Hand in hand, they made their way through the narrow corridor of the forgotten MEKA sublevel, Hana still shaky, her steps uncertain, but grounded by the pressure of Sombra’s palm against hers.

The rain had let up by the time they emerged from the access tunnel. Mist clung to the neon-lit streets of Busan, slicking the pavement. The city had gone quiet — or maybe just distant. 

The world felt unreal.

Hana didn’t ask where they were going.

Sombra led her through alleys, old lifts, rooftop catwalks — invisible paths she’d memorized like a ghost slipping through the bones of the city. It wasn’t long before they reached a sleek, unmarked tower overlooking the harbor.

The skyrise safehouse wasn’t much from the outside. But inside — floor-to-ceiling tinted windows, soundproof panels, a wall of monitors and hardlight displays — it was a high-tech sanctuary clumsily placed together. Definitely not supposed to be here. Cold, modern. Secure.

Sombra closed the door behind them and watched Hana take it in.

Hana said nothing. She stood in the middle of the room, drenched in a silence that wasn’t quite empty — more like… surrender.

Not defeat.

Just the kind that came when the fight inside her had burned too long without rest.

She glanced down at their still-joined hands.

She hadn’t noticed until now. Or maybe she had — but didn’t want to let go.

Sombra noticed too. But she didn’t comment. She simply let go gently and turned away, giving Hana space.

“You’re safe here,” she said quietly. “No surveillance. No tracking. MEKA doesn’t even know this place exists.”

Hana nodded faintly.

That alone — that she was here, in a place Sombra had built, chosen, trusted enough to bring her to — it settled something deep in her chest. Not peace, not really. But a breath. A pause.

A moment.

“I’ll… get you something dry,” Sombra offered.

Hana didn’t answer.

But when Sombra walked past her toward the back room, she heard the faintest whisper:

“…Thank you.”

And it meant more than either of them could admit

The hum of the city below was a muffled echo behind triple-reinforced glass. Hana sat curled up on the low-set couch that faced the panoramic view, one of Sombra’s oversized throw blankets draped around her shoulders. The fabric smelled faintly like ozone and spice — whatever cologne Sombra favored, mixed with circuitry and dust.

It grounded her, in a strange way.

The floor-to-ceiling windows gave a panoramic view of Busan’s coast, blurred by light fog. The lights glimmered like ghost stars. The war had never reached this high, this untouched. And yet, down in the bowels of MEKA, the rot had grown all the same.

She stared without seeing, hands fidgeting beneath the blanket. That useless grounding trick again — thumb tapping finger, index tracing her knuckles. It didn’t work. It never had. But she kept doing it. Because stopping meant surrender.

A soft clink pulled her from the spiral.

Sombra returned, now in a loose hoodie and dark leggings, carrying two mugs of something warm. She set one in front of Hana on the small table. The scent of cinnamon and vanilla drifted up in a soft curl.

“Not poison, I promise,” Sombra teased lightly, easing down onto the other end of the couch. She didn't press in. Just existed beside her.

“…Thanks,” Hana murmured.

She picked up the mug, but didn’t drink. Just held it, letting the warmth seep into her fingers.

For a few moments, neither of them spoke.

Sombra leaned back, stretching her legs out in front of her. The screen to her right flickered, displaying faint lines of code — a scan still running, searching MEKA’s deep files.

“I saw the footage,” Hana finally said.

Sombra didn’t look at her, but she stilled.

“The Gwishin. When they breached. It was classified. But someone leaked it. Probably you.”

A quiet scoff. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I couldn’t stop watching it.” Hana’s voice was thin. Frayed. “Even after I came out of surgery. I’d… I’d wake up and it’d be playing on the inside of my eyelids.”

Another pause. Then: “I thought if I watched it enough, I’d understand why I lived.”

Sombra turned her head slightly. Still no words.

“But I never did. It didn’t make any more sense. Just more noise.”

A crack showed in her composure. Her fingers tightened around the mug.

“I don’t remember the escape door opening. I don’t remember Dae-Hyun screaming. I don’t even remember pulling the trigger.”

Sombra leaned forward a bit, resting her elbows on her knees, clasping her hands together.

“You’re not the only one with ghosts in the system,” she said.

That earned a faint, humorless laugh.

“Right. Yours just leave bodies behind.”

“Touché.”

They both fell silent again.

Then, without looking at her, Sombra asked, “So why me?”

Hana blinked. “What?”

“You could’ve gone to Overwatch. Or Dae-Hyun. Or any of your spotless heroes. So why track me down? Why demand I help you tear down the system that raised you?”

Hana stared at her hands.

Because they’d all told her to let it go.

Because no one else believed her. Because no one else wanted to.

Because Sombra never looked at her like she was broken.

“I don’t know,” Hana lied. “Maybe because you don’t pretend the world makes sense.”

Sombra finally met her eyes.

And for a second — just a second — her gaze softened.

“You’re wrong, you know,” she said.

“About what?”

“I don’t help people. Not really.”

Hana smiled, just barely. “Then why am I here?”

Sombra didn’t answer.

But she didn’t deny it either.

Instead, she stood, adjusting her sleeves.

Hana hesitated, then set her mug down and followed, slower this time.

But just before she passed the couch, she paused.

“Hey,” she said, softly.

Sombra looked back.

“…Thanks. For the blanket.”

Sombra raised a brow. “Seriously? After dragging you through surveillance hell and triggering your deepest trauma, that’s what I get thanked for?”

Hana gave a faint smirk. “It’s warm.”

Sombra let out a laugh. Real. Quick. Then turned back to her tech.

And behind her, Hana sat quietly. Her thoughts turning for the worst as realization set in. Their whole mission. Their goal.

Hana’s voice broke the silence again, this time quieter. Sharper at the edges.

“…What if we failed?”

Sombra, who had been typing on the holographic display, paused mid-swipe. “Failed?”

Hana’s arms curled tighter around the blanket, fingers clutching it like a shield. Her eyes stayed fixed on the untouched mug.

“I didn’t get anything. We left with nothing.” Her voice faltered. “I—had a breakdown. I froze up. You had to get me out of there. What if I just… ruined everything?”

The words lingered in the air like smoke, thick with shame. “I keep telling myself it was just one step. That we’ll go back. That it’s fine. But I can’t stop thinking that I messed up the one chance we had. And that you—”

She stopped herself before finishing. And that you’ll leave.

She didn’t have to say it.

Sombra turned slowly to face her.

Hana finally looked up, guilt written all over her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry now — that dull ache after the storm. That exhaustion that settled deep in the bones.

“…I was weak,” she finished.

Sombra didn’t speak right away.

Instead, she lifted her holopad, tapped a few commands, and brought up a grid of decrypted files — video logs, schematic diagrams, old surveillance footage, incident reports with classified stamps across the headers. They hovered above the table in a glowing array of damning data.

“I grabbed this,” Sombra said simply.

Hana blinked, staring at the evidence. “But—how?”

“I went invisible,” Sombra replied, a half-smile teasing at her lips. “Well, not technically but you'd think so. While you were catching your breath. While you were trying to survive your own mind. I was working.”

Hana stared in disbelief.

“You thought I’d leave empty-handed?” Sombra added, raising an eyebrow. “Come on, chica. Give me some credit.”

A tight laugh escaped Hana, choked with relief.

“But…” she trailed, "I thought.."

“You think too much.” Sombra gave her a faint smile. “You don’t have to carry every disaster like it’s your fault.”

“But it is—”

“No.” Sombra’s voice sharpened just slightly. “It isn’t.”

Silence stretched between them, charged but not hostile. Just... full.

Eventually, Hana looked over the holovids again. All the data. Everything. Right there at Sombra's finger tips.

“You’re full of surprises,” she murmured.

“Only the fun kind,” Sombra replied, softer now.

They stood there a moment longer before Sombra motioned toward the terminal.

Hana rose to her feet.

Still shaking. Still afraid.

But not alone.

The rain outside had slowed to a mist, city lights flickering through the fogged windowpanes. The hum of Sombra’s equipment buzzed low and constant, casting a pale glow over the room as the decryption process completed.

Hana stood at the edge of the monitor, still damp from the earlier tunnel excursion. Her eyes were puffy from crying, her hair clinging to her face, but she hadn’t moved since Sombra had began to work her magic.

She needed to see it—to know this wasn’t all in her head.

Lines of code streamed down the large screen. Sombra sat at the terminal, arms crossed, jaw tight. Her fingers twitched, not at the keyboard, but at the air—like she was physically resisting the urge to take control.

Hana taken aback by the sudden change in the hacker. What had caused such a shift? Leaning over her shoulder to read the screens.

“MEKA’s using foreign contractors,” Hana said slowly, scanning the flagged document on screen. “Private ones. These aren’t Korean companies.”

Sombra let out a sharp exhale, smirking. “Try shell companies. Those names are just fronts. All of them loop back to one central node: something Talon touched. Not directly, but…”

“But enough.” Hana looked at her. “Why would they—?”

“Because war’s a business.” Sombra’s tone was flippant, almost bitter. “You know how it goes. Manufactured threats. Controlled responses. MEKA keeps the funding, the board keeps their seats, and Talon gets to beta test their shiny new toys.”

Hana recoiled slightly, staring at the screen like it would shift if she blinked.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” she whispered.

Sombra stood up abruptly, pacing behind her. “Yeah. And you were never supposed to see it. That’s the whole point. Everyone stays in their little roles, following the script. Cute mech girl, government darling, pop idol turned patriot.” Her voice dipped, the words twisted with sarcasm.

Hana turned to face her, brows furrowed. “Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not,” Sombra snapped, too fast. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides.

Then, just as quickly, her voice dropped, almost wounded.

“I’m not,” she said again, quieter. “I just...”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

Hana watched her, unsettled. It was like seeing someone unravel at the edges—silently, frantically stitching themselves together between sentences.

Sombra spun back around and sat heavily at the terminal, pulling up another window. “There’s more. You should see this.”

Hana didn’t move at first. The whiplash of Sombra’s shifting moods had her stomach in knots. Part of her wanted to ask what the hell that was about. Part of her didn’t want to pry.

She stood slowly and approached the screen again.

A familiar symbol blinked in the corner of the footage Sombra queued: MEKA’s encrypted comms system.

“This... this is from our secure channels,” Hana whispered.

“Leaked. Rerouted. Recorded.” Sombra clicked play.

The footage showed a classified briefing—one Hana had been barred from attending after her recovery. A man in a suit, face blurred for security, discussed unit loss thresholds, civilian sacrifice rates, and test readiness.

“They’re expecting another Gwishin attack,” Hana said, her voice cracking.

“They’re counting on it,” Sombra added.

And something inside Hana twisted so hard it felt like she might be sick.

She stepped back, away from the terminal. Her breathing was shallow again, pulse racing. Sombra noticed.

“Hey—” she started, standing.

“I just— I need—” Hana backed up, shaking her head. “This is too much. I can’t— This isn’t what I thought we’d find. I thought it was cover-ups, bad orders, not— not—”

“Conspiracy?” Sombra offered, almost mockingly.

Hana gave her a look that landed hard.

And Sombra froze.

Then, defensively, “I warned you it wouldn’t be clean.”

“I trusted you,” Hana shot back, unexpected fury surfacing. “And now I feel like I’m falling down a hole I can’t climb out of.”

The silence was tense. Sombra’s hands trembled slightly, but she quickly jammed them into her pockets.

“…Then maybe you shouldn’t have trusted me,” she muttered, almost to herself.

And just like that, she turned away—retreating to a darker corner of the room towards a lone table, curling inward onto the chair. Her posture shut off. Closed.

Push.

Hana’s throat tightened. She stood there, unsure of what to say. The weight of what they'd uncovered, the emotional toll, the fragile flicker of something real between them — all teetering on a cliff’s edge.

The terminal behind them let out a soft beep.

Sombra stiffened. Her head turned slightly, just enough to glance at the alert on the screen.

A blinking warning.

Data retrieval triggered secondary trace.

Source ping: unknown. Possible pursuit en route.

She inhaled slowly, tension radiating through her frame.

“What is it?” Hana asked, voice still shaky.

Sombra turned toward her, the mask back on now. Collected. Calm. But her eyes were sharp—calculating.

The terminal’s warning pulsed again.

Sombra’s jaw clenched.

She stood, quickly and with purpose, eyes scanning the rest of her network. She didn’t speak for a long moment. The only sound was the hum of her tech and the soft tapping of her fingers across the controls.

Then finally—without turning around—she spoke.

“You should go.”

Hana blinked, caught mid-breath. “What?”

Sombra’s voice was cold now. Detached. “Back to the base. You’ll be safer there.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We just got here—”

“And you shouldn’t have come in the first place.” Sombra finally turned, her eyes unreadable behind their usual glow. “This isn’t your world. You’re not ready for it.”

Something in Hana recoiled. The words felt like a slap.

“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” she snapped, stepping forward. “You brought me here. You showed me everything. You told me the truth—finally—and now you’re just throwing me out?”

“You wanted answers. You got them.” Sombra folded her arms tight, voice clipped. “So go back to your world. The one where people still lie to you, but at least they smile while doing it.”

Hana stared at her, stunned.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked, voice rising. “Why even go through all this trouble? Why sneak into my stream? Why pull me out of that place, help me breathe again, only to shove me away like none of it meant anything?”

Sombra’s mouth opened. Closed.

Her eyes flicked—left, then right—like she wanted to say something but couldn’t.

“It’s not safe,” she finally whispered, and it didn’t sound like she was talking about Talon anymore.

“That’s not what this is about,” Hana said, quieter now. “You’re scared. Of me.”

Sombra stiffened. Her expression hardened again, but it wasn’t anger—it was fear, raw and buried beneath practiced indifference.

“You don’t know me,” she said. “Not really.”

“I was starting to,” Hana replied.

A long pause.

The warning on the screen pulsed again.

Sombra turned back to the controls, back to the shadows of data and defense systems—where she could hide.

“The coordinates to get back are in your holophone,” she said. “Encrypted exit routes are tagged. Don’t wait too long.”

That was it.

Dismissive. Controlled.

But Hana saw the way her hands trembled against the desk. The way her shoulders dropped the second she turned away.

She wanted her to stay. Hana knew it.

But some part of her—some deep, fractured part—was still convinced that pushing people away was the only way to keep them safe. Or maybe the only way to stop herself from getting hurt.

Hana lingered in the doorway, heart pounding, anger dulled into something else. Sadness. Confusion. Something in-between.

She left without another word.

The door closed behind her with a soft click.

Sombra remained at the terminal, still and silent—except for one tiny movement: her hand tightening into a fist over the desk, knuckles white.

The door hissed shut. Silence settled in the room like dust.

Sombra didn’t move for a long time.

The terminal’s warning light blinked quietly, now a dull rhythm in the dark. Her fingers still rested on the desk, half-curled, as if frozen mid-command. The tension in her shoulders had not eased—only shifted, sharp and brittle.

Then, in a swift, violent motion, she slammed her fist down on the desk.

The lights flickered. One of the monitors cracked, sending a spiderweb of digital distortion across a stream of surveillance feeds.

“Pendeja,” she hissed under her breath—though she didn’t know who she meant. Hana? Herself?

Maybe both.

She turned away from the desk, pacing the length of the room like a caged animal, breathing ragged. Every time she slowed, some memory of Hana’s voice flashed through her mind—calm, hurt, accusing. That look in her eyes.

“Why even go through all this trouble…?”

Sombra pressed the heels of her palms to her temples, digging in as if she could force the memory out.

You brought her in.

You let her in.

And that terrified her more than anything.

Her systems beeped again. A Talon relay ping. Faint. Too close.

She pulled up the feed and ran a trace with shaking fingers. No coordinates locked. No immediate threat. But they knew someone had pulled the files.

Too late to undo it now.

The panic she shoved down finally surfaced as she collapsed onto the edge of the sofa, elbows on her knees. Her breath came shallow, chest tight. Her cloak lay folded beside her—lightly crumpled. Placing a hand over the damp article of clothing. Almost wishing she could hug it, maybe get an ounce of comfort. 

Sombra looked at it like it was a mistake she didn’t know how to undo.

“She should’ve stayed,” she whispered, throat dry. “She should’ve stayed…”

But she hadn’t asked her to.

She’d told her to leave. Forced her to.

Because if Hana stayed, if she got close again—Sombra didn’t know if she could survive it. The fragility of the moment scared her more than Doomfist, more than Moira, more than Talon. Because if Hana saw her as something worth saving…

What did that make her when she kept proving she wasn’t?

She curled into herself on the couch, arm across her eyes. Her breath was unsteady, silent gasps between clenched teeth. No tears fell. Sombra hadn’t cried in years. But this—this was the closest she had come since the day she stopped being Olivia Colomar.

The safehouse felt colder without Hana in it.

She hated that.

Chapter Text

The overhead lights glared sterile white, humming in dull vibration, casting stark shadows against steel walls and concrete. Rows of soldiers sat stiff-backed in their seats, MEKA insignia crisp on their uniforms. The giant display screen at the front of the hall pulsed with maps and data, always updating — always watching.

Hana sat among them. Uniform perfect. Expression locked.

Her right hand twitched slightly beneath the desk — not enough to be visible. Not enough to be weak. Just enough to let the anxiety leak out through her fingertips.

She tapped her thumb against her middle finger. Then again. Then again.

It didn’t calm her.

But she did it anyway.

“Civilian evacuation from the Yeosu sector is complete,” Commander Yoon reported from the front, her voice clinical, unbothered. “We’re receiving requests for armored escort for the recovery teams. Sensor sweeps show residual radiation and potential bioelectrical activity.”

Gwishin.

The word wasn’t spoken — not yet — but everyone knew what it meant.

Hana’s body tensed automatically. Her shoulders stayed still, but her chest constricted — tight as if seawater still filled her lungs. A phantom sensation. One she couldn’t shake even now.

Her gaze flicked up to the screen.

Satellite footage from two days ago: a grainy blur of movement in the coastal trench, a shifting shadow too large to be natural.

Unmistakable.

Hana’s lips pressed into a thin line.

The murmurs around her barely registered. Her ears filled with a different kind of static — not the room, but memory.

Flash drive. Cold data. Fluorescent light in Sombra’s skyrise hideout.

Buried MEKA logs. Glitched transmissions.

Unfiltered footage. Not Gwishin hunting — not exactly. Tracking. Luring. Using tech buried decades ago.

The image of a mech — not one she recognized — surgically altered, broken open, repurposed — flickered in her mind.

She remembered the way her hands had shaken when she scrolled through those files. The cold dread that settled in her spine when she saw the MEKA logo embedded into unauthorized projects. The date stamps. The blacklisted engineers.

“Lieutenant Song.”

The sound of her name jerked her back.

She snapped her head up.

Commander Yoon stared directly at her. “Status on Unit 12?”

A beat passed. Hana’s mouth opened.

“Operational,” she answered, voice even. “Diagnostic scans came back clean this morning. I’ll run a test drift after training rotation.”

Yoon nodded once, already moving on. “Very good.”

But Hana barely heard her.

The screen had shifted again — a low-res recording of a destroyed underwater base, frames skipping. A large silhouette in the corner of the footage — vaguely serpentine, unidentifiable, but unmistakably not natural.

Her eyes narrowed.

Hana’s fingers twitched again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Her heartbeat was up. Her body felt hot despite the chill of the hall.

A flash of static from the screen brought her back again — this time a schematic of their city’s sea wall.

No one knew what was coming next.

But Hana did.

She had seen it.

The silence that followed the briefing felt like ice against her nerves.

Around her, the room stood. Officers filed out. Quiet. Mechanical. Routine.

But Hana remained in her seat, her jaw tight, the pressure behind her eyes threatening to break loose.

Behind her, a quiet voice: “You okay?”

It was Dae-Hyun.

She didn’t turn. “Fine.”

A pause. “You didn’t take notes.”

“I don’t need to.”

“You always do.”

Her eyes slid shut.

“I said I’m fine.”

Another beat. She heard the sound of him shifting his weight, debating whether to say more. But he didn’t push.

When she finally looked up, the room was nearly empty.

Her eyes scanned the corner of the room — the one where she imagined a shimmer might flicker. Where purple eyes might watch behind invisible walls.

But there was nothing.

Just a blank screen. A buzzing light.

And a ghost of a memory clinging to the back of her mind.

Her thoughts were a knot of contradictions: focus, follow the mission, don’t slip. But no matter how tightly she clenched her fists or forced herself to keep eye contact with the screen, her mind circled back to her.

Sombra’s voice. Her laugh. The coldness in her eyes when she’d told Hana to leave. The sharp, final twist of her expression before she blinked out.

It haunted her. It hurt.

Was that goodbye?

A part of Hana — the part she hated — almost hoped Sombra was watching. That she'd see Hana enduring this. That she’d realize how much it mattered. How much she mattered.

But it was silent.

No pings. No glitching shadows. No smug skull-shaped calling card.

Just silence.

The fluorescent lights here were just as harsh. The tiles too white. The mirror too honest.

Hana leaned forward, hands braced against the cold edge of the sink, eyes locked onto her reflection like it might move without her.

The water ran. Not too loud — just enough to fill the silence in her head. She hadn’t meant to come here, not at first. She had wandered the corridor in a haze until muscle memory guided her steps. Now she stared, chest rising and falling too fast, like her lungs couldn’t figure out how to work without an oxygen feed.

She wanted to scream.

To cry.

To punch the mirror and bleed just enough to feel real.

The pressure in her chest clawed for release. Her fingers twitched against the porcelain, the same restless beat she’d used in the briefing — thumb against finger. Again. Again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

It didn’t work.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Images flared up again — Sombra’s back as she left. The glitching data file. The Gwishin rising from the black. The pain behind her ribs when she realized she was alone again.

A stifled sound tore from her throat — part sob, part breath.

But she caught herself.

Not here.

She couldn’t.

She knew the locker room had cameras in the corners, even if they claimed otherwise. She knew the sound of boots could echo down these tiled halls at any moment. She knew someone might walk in, someone from her squad or worse — Yuna. Dae-Hyun.

She couldn't afford to crack. Not again. Not so soon.

Not where someone might see.

So she turned off the tap. Cold water clung to her fingers as she wiped them down her face in one slow, practiced motion — as if that could smother the storm inside.

The mask slid back on.

Her posture straightened. Shoulders squared. Chin up.

A soldier. A pilot. A symbol.

The door hissed open behind her, breaking the quiet.

“Lieutenant Song,” a junior officer said. “Your MEKA unit’s prepped. Sim training rotation’s waiting on your green light.”

She nodded without looking. “On my way.”

Hana made her way to the MEKA combat simulator. Training bay Theta.

The hangar was loud in that particular kind of silence: the whir of mechanics, distant voices over comms, steel-on-steel clanging from a nearby maintenance platform. Familiar. Rehearsed. Cold.

Hana stood beneath the towering shadow of her MEKA unit, head tilted upward, arms at her sides.

The paint had been touched up since the last deployment. The blast marks from the Gwishin attack — gone. The cockpit hatch had been reassembled with a cleaner, more efficient frame. It looked newer than she remembered.

Too new.

Too clean.

Her boots felt heavy on the grated floor. The scent of lubricant and ozone clawed into her throat like smoke. She inhaled too sharply and regretted it.

You’ve done this a thousand times.

But this time, she hesitated.

One step forward. Her hand touched the cool metal ladder built into the side. A tremor rippled through her fingers. She clenched them, willing the shake to stop — but her hand wouldn’t listen.

She’d nearly died in there.

She had screamed inside that mech, felt it crushed around her. She remembered the static of her HUD cutting out, the deafening impact when water rushed in and her oxygen thinned. The ache in her ribs from the emergency ejection. The moment she was no longer D.Va, but just Hana, broken and burning and sinking.

Her knuckles whitened against the rung.

She pressed her forehead to the side of the mech for a heartbeat. Just to ground herself. Just to be still.

She didn’t want anyone to see her face right now.

Three taps with her thumb.

Again.

Again.

Still trembling.

"Hana," came Dae-Hyun’s voice through the comm, a gentle nudge. “You good?”

She hesitated too long.

“Fine,” she replied, voice tight. She reached up, climbing.

Every rung closer to the cockpit made her pulse pound harder.

The hatch hissed open.

Get in. Just get in.

She dropped into the pilot seat with more force than grace. The cockpit sealed around her. Darkness first — then a slow, humming glow as the neural link began to spool up.

She dropped into the pilot seat with more force than grace. The cockpit sealed around her. Darkness first — then a slow, humming glow as the neural link began to spool up.

The pressure in her chest built like it always did just before launch. But this time it didn't feel like adrenaline. It felt like the walls were closing in. Like water on the outside of the glass.

The boot-up HUD flickered to life.

SYNC INITIATED

D.VA SYSTEMS ONLINE

She gripped the control sticks harder than she needed to. Her gloves creaked. The shiver in her arms hadn’t gone away.

Just like the memory hadn't.

Her heartbeat echoed in her helmet. She blinked hard.

"You lived," she reminded herself silently. "You’re not broken. You’re not gone."

But she didn’t believe it yet.

The training simulation began with a pulse of artificial sunlight as the environment rendered around her — a virtual cityscape overlaying the familiar walls of the simulator dome. Drones spawned on the horizon, target markers blinking red across her display.

A familiar voice filled her earpiece: “Standard maneuver set. Timed objective. Begin on your mark.”

The countdown ticked:

3

2

1

She moved.

The mech responded, swift and smooth, the way it always had. Boosters ignited. The terrain blurred. She whipped around corners, launched her pulse guns, dispatched targets with precise muscle memory.

But her body wasn’t in sync with her mind.

Every time the frame jolted or the cockpit rattled, she flinched. Her breath caught on the tiniest impact. Her heartbeat was a relentless drum, even when nothing was wrong.

She miscalculated a trajectory, clipping a virtual structure. A jolt rattled the mech — too hard, too fast — and her vision whited out.

Underwater again.

The HUD glitched just for a second.

The image of twisted metal. Of water flooding her field of vision. The hiss of failing systems. Her name screamed over radio static—

“Hana, come in.”

Dae-Hyun’s voice snapped her back.

She realized she’d stopped. Frozen mid-course. One of the training drones fired — a stun round — and it pinged harmlessly off her shield, but the sound hit her like a bullet.

Her fingers twitched over the controls. Jaw clenched. Eyes hot.

She launched forward again, reckless this time.

Too fast. Sloppy angles.

She overcorrected and nearly slammed into a wall before slamming on the reverse thrusters. Her teeth rattled.

“Focus,” she whispered. “Come on.”

She forced her aim steady. Locked on the last drone.

Bang.

Target down.

The exercise ended.

SIMULATION COMPLETE

SCORE: 83.4%

The silence afterward felt heavy.

Dae-Hyun’s voice again, quieter now. “You okay?”

She let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Just… rusty.”

He didn’t press.

Her hands stayed on the controls longer than they needed to. Even after the cockpit started to open.

The lift descended slowly, bringing her back to the ground. Back to the surface. But she didn’t feel grounded at all.

She stepped out to find a couple techs watching from across the bay. One nodded. Another looked concerned.

She didn’t give them a second glance.

Instead, she walked away from her mech — her mind elsewhere, her body trembling from something no one else could see.

She told herself it was progress.

But it felt like survival.

The locker room was quiet.

Sterile tiles. Dull fluorescent lighting. The distant hum of ventilation the only sound. Hana sat on the bench, hair still damp with sweat, her gear discarded around her like a molted shell.

Her bodysuit peeled halfway down to her waist. A towel draped across her shoulders. She stared at her shaking hands, fingers twitching faintly as if still feeling the tremors from the cockpit.

No cameras. At least to her knowledge in this portion. No expectations.

Just her.

She tried grounding herself the way they taught her in therapy — pressed her palms to the cool metal bench, focused on the sensation. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. She counted.

It didn’t work.

It never really did.

The locker room blurred around the edges of her vision. Her jaw clenched so tight it ached. Her chest rose too fast, too shallow.

She scrubbed a hand down her face. Get it together.

But her body wasn’t listening to her brain.

She curled forward slowly, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. Silent. Still. If anyone walked in, they’d just think she was tired.

But inside, she was coming apart.

Why did you leave?

Why did you push me away?

She hadn’t cried in weeks. Not since the first few nights of silence. She thought she’d wrung herself dry.

But something cracked loose now — something brittle and exhausted.

A sob escaped her lips before she could stop it. Just one.

She clenched her teeth again, swallowing the rest.

She couldn’t cry. Not here. Not now.

Dae-Hyun might come looking. Someone else might need her.

The weight of the D.Va name settled over her again like armor she couldn’t remove.

Hana sat upright. She wiped her eyes with the towel and took a deep breath that didn’t really help.

Her holophone buzzed. She flinched.

Not her. Just a news alert.

She checked anyway. No message. No glitch. No purple skull.

Of course not.

She locked the screen and rose from the bench. Each movement felt heavier than it should have. Robotic. Like she was back inside the mech — on autopilot.

As she left the locker room, she caught her reflection in the mirror near the exit.

Tired eyes. Damp hair clinging to her neck. A girl wearing a warrior’s face.

She hesitated.

Then she pulled the towel tighter around her shoulders and walked out, heading back toward her quarters.

Back into the silence.

The walk back to her quarters was long — or maybe it just felt that way.

Her boots echoed down the sterile hallway, each step a soft reminder of how empty this part of the base felt at night. The kind of quiet where thoughts grew too loud.

Rain tapped against the windows, trailing down like the tears she refused to let fall.

Sombra hadn’t sent anything. Not a glitch. Not a spark. Not even a trace.

You don’t just vanish. Not like that.

Not after everything.

She reached her door, hesitated for a second too long, then keyed in her access. The room welcomed her with that familiar hum of lights flickering on. Too bright. Too clean.

Too much like nothing had changed.

But it had.

Hana stood still in the center of the room, eyes scanning over her space.

Her trophies gleamed again on the shelf — newly polished. Her posters were all back in place, courtesy of MEKA’s PR team. The bright colors and staged smiles of her old sponsors stared back at her, like hollow memories trapped in glossy print.

She didn’t feel like that girl anymore.

She stepped in, letting the door slide closed behind her with a whisper. The click sounded more final than it should have.

Her fingers brushed the edge of one of the trophies. World Championship MVP. Seoul Arena. It felt like it belonged to someone else now. Someone who didn’t freeze up in the middle of training. Someone who didn’t shake every time she touched the mech’s controls.

She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled her holophone from her side pouch. It felt heavy in her hand.

A few messages blinked — check-ins from Yuna, some neutral updates from Dae-Hyun. A marketing request she ignored.

Then she opened the hidden app.

Her and Sombra’s encrypted chat glitched briefly before the familiar skull logo bloomed in violet on the screen. And then—

Nothing.

Just a blank thread. Same as before.

But she didn’t close it.

She scrolled up slowly, rereading past messages — the ones before it all went silent.

[Sombra]: You're more useful than I thought. Try not to get caught, princesa.

[Hana]: You’re one to talk. Just stay in the shadows and let me do the hard part.

[Sombra]: So feisty. I like this version of you.

She paused on that one. Her thumb hovered over it.

She remembered how it made her blush at the time, how she’d typed a reply and deleted it three times before settling on something sarcastic.

[Hana]: You like any version that gets your job done.

She hadn’t really meant that.

She closed her eyes. Let the phone rest on her lap.

Her room felt colder suddenly, despite the climate control. Like the silence left behind a chill.

For a second, she thought about messaging again. Typing “Where are you?” or “Just say something.”

But she didn’t.

Instead, she sat there — surrounded by trophies of a past life and echoes of someone who had become more than just an ally.

Why did you leave me, Sombra?

The rain hadn’t stopped.

It was heavier now. Sheets of water cascading against the windows, as though Busan itself wept for her — loud enough to drown out the hum of electronics, the low buzz of her holophone screen still faintly lit.

Hana exhaled softly and set it aside, face down.

She didn’t bother changing into sleepwear. Just pulled the covers around herself still dressed, curled up on top of the blanket more than under it. The ache in her chest was sharper when she was alone like this — unspoken, unresolved.

She stared at the ceiling for a long time.

Her mind drifted — to the empty tunnel, to the panic that choked her, to Sombra’s voice sharp and then suddenly soft again.

The question circled her brain like a drone caught in a failing orbit:

Did she care? Did she ever?

She didn’t mean to fall asleep.

But her body gave out before her heart did.

The night bled into day that bled into more days. Each day a fleeting hope for a sign.

The rain hadn’t let up.

Busan was locked in a typhoon that matched Hana’s mood more closely than she cared to admit. Every time lightning cracked across the sky, she hoped — foolishly — that it was Sombra hijacking another satellite. Another stream glitch. A message in the static.

But there was nothing.

Five days.

Five damn days.

No messages. No encrypted skull pop-ups. No sarcastic commentary. No digital trace in any of the rooms they’d used to communicate.

Just silence.

Hana’s hand hovered over her holophone again, scrolling through the last few encrypted chats — as if staring harder would make Sombra appear.

Nothing.

She gripped the device until her knuckles turned white and forced herself to shove it under a stack of clothes on the dresser.

She’d had enough.

Her fingers curled into fists as she paced her room. Rain pattered against the windows, steady and cold, like it was mocking her.

“Why did I even follow her?” she muttered to herself, bitter. “Why the hell did I think she was different?”

Hana stared at her computer like it was a ghost.

“She’s Talon.”

The word burned in her throat.

“She probably ran the second it got dangerous. Or got bored. Or both.”

Her voice cracked at the end — not from sadness, but the rage barely being held back.

A week ago she would’ve defended Sombra. Argued there was more to her than the faction stitched to her name. That she'd seen a different side of her — something real in those moments between missions, when it was quiet, when they weren’t pretending.

Now it just felt like a game she lost. A con she walked into willingly.

Hana shoved the chair, and it scraped violently against the floor. Her mouse and pad fell to the floor. She didn't bother to pick it up.

Instead, she sat on the edge of her bed, fingers pressing into her temples, jaw locked.

She hated this feeling — the helplessness, the not knowing. The way her mind filled in the silence with the worst possible scenarios. That maybe Sombra had used her. That maybe none of it meant anything.

The fight in her chest warred with the flicker of hurt she wouldn’t admit aloud. She squeezed her eyes shut.

You’re better than this, she told herself. You’re MEKA. You survived worse.

But the part of her that wanted Sombra to come back — to explain herself, to say it wasn’t what it looked like — that part was still there. And it made the fury worse.

The silence was the loudest part.

She didn’t remember turning on the holo-screen.

Had she?

One second she was sitting there, fists curled in her lap, trying not to scream at the silence — and the next, the soft blue glow of the screen painted the dark room in cold light. Her room lights stayed off. She didn’t need to see herself right now.

The local news played like white noise at first — city flooding warnings, a report on civilian evacuations in coastal towns, a brief piece on MEKA’s ongoing recruitment campaigns. Hana didn’t pay attention until the Talon insignia appeared in the corner of the screen.

She sat up straighter, heart leaping to her throat.

The anchor's voice was steady. Detached.

“In international developments, Officials report increased Talon activity in Eastern Europe. Unconfirmed sources say a data breach in a secure facility may have triggered internal conflict within the organization. Several operatives are unaccounted for, presumed dead or missing. Officials have not released the identities of those involved.”

Hana’s breath hitched. She leaned forward, eyes scanning the bottom of the screen, hoping — praying — for something.

A name.

A code.

A purple skull.

But there was nothing. No mention. No signal. No clue.

“In other news—”

She muted the holo-screen, slowly.

The silence this time wasn’t empty. It was crushing.

Sombra wasn’t on the list because no one cared enough to put her on one. Or maybe she wasn’t missing at all. Maybe she was fine. Maybe she really had ghosted her.

The thought hurt more than she expected.

She stared at the muted broadcast for a while longer. Static flickered faintly at the edge of the screen — almost taunting. For a second she thought it was her. A flicker of hope. A sign.

It wasn’t.

Her shoulders slumped, the fight draining out of her all over again.

She curled up under the blanket on her bed, facing away from the coat that still lay where she’d knocked it. Her holophone buzzed once — a reminder from the base about tomorrow’s briefing — and she ignored it.

For the first time in days, Hana didn’t check the encrypted chat.

She didn’t want to see the empty feed again.

The next day, another PR. Moments like these that bled each minute, every hour into what felt like one continuous day and night. 

The lights overhead were too bright. Too white. Every surface in the dressing room gleamed like it had been bleached of warmth — sterile, perfect, polished. Hana sat in front of the vanity as her stylist ran a curling iron through her hair, the soft hiss of steam lost under the gentle hum of voices outside the door.

She didn’t look at the stylist. She didn’t look at anyone.

Her gaze stayed locked on her own reflection — not on her face, but through it, like the girl in the mirror wasn’t real. Just a shell someone had placed over her like a costume.

“Hold still, Miss Song,” the woman said gently. “Almost done.”

Miss Song. Not Hana. Not even D.Va. Just a title now. A name that had weight, responsibility, expectations. Her real name barely felt like hers anymore.

She sat with her hands folded in her lap, thumbs rhythmically tapping her knuckles. The tremors started. When she couldn’t tell if the shiver in her hand was from trauma or adrenaline.

It didn’t help today.

Her fingers wouldn’t stop.

Behind her, an assistant talked into a headset. Something about sponsors. Something about airtime. She wasn’t listening.

She was thinking about Sombra.

About that stupid coat she’d left behind.

About the encrypted chat that hadn’t blinked in days.

Hana squeezed her hands tighter in her lap, cutting off the tremors by force.

"You okay?" the stylist asked, gently. “You’re paler than usual.”

Hana smiled. Reflex. Automatic. A twitch of the lips that said I’m fine, even when she wasn’t.

“I’m okay. Just a little tired.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” the woman said, setting the curler down. “But you’re a fighter. Everyone says so.”

Everyone says so.

Hana didn’t answer. The stylist gave her a final once-over and stepped back with a satisfied nod.

"You’re all set, Miss Song."

She stood, smoothing down the front of her re-issued MEKA flight suit. Pink, bright, spotless. Like nothing had happened. Like the last few months had never existed. Like she hadn’t watched her mech explode out in front of her. Like she hadn’t almost died hitting that water.

You don’t get to fall apart.

The words of her CO echoed from a week prior. Soft but sharp. Polished military sympathy:

“We understand this is difficult, but the world still needs D.Va. You’ve had your recovery period. Time to return to form.”

Return to form.

That was what this was. A return to the form of D.Va. Not the person.

You’re a symbol.

Symbols didn’t bleed. Didn’t panic. Didn’t cry into strange hacker jackets in the middle of safehouses.

They smiled.

They waved.

They made people feel safe even when they were barely holding it together.

A knock on the dressing room door made her flinch.

“Miss Song, they’re ready for you.”

She straightened, pulling herself into place.

The nod. The smile. The spark in her eyes that she’d learned how to fake even on empty days.

The hallway beyond was quiet, flanked by a few security personnel and assistants who followed at a respectful distance. As she walked toward the stage, her footfalls sounded too loud. Too real. Her shadow looked too small.

She wondered — if Sombra were watching this feed, would she laugh?

Would she admire how well Hana had slid back into the role, or see right through it?

Would she feel guilty?

Or was she even alive to feel anything?

The stage was just ahead. She could hear the murmuring crowd. Cameras being tested. Someone laughed — one of the tech crew, probably — and the sound cut through her like a wire pulled tight.

She stopped.

The assistant in front of her kept walking a few steps before noticing she wasn’t behind him. 

He turned, confused. “Miss Song?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Her hand had lifted on its own and pressed flat against the wall, as if to hold herself up.

The flight suit’s sleeves were snug against her skin. The same fabric she’d worn a hundred times before. The same polished pink, the sponsor logos, the little winged bunny stitched into her chest — D.Va’s mark. Her mark. It used to feel like armor. Now it felt like camouflage.

Inside, she was a different person.

Her heart beat faster than it should have. Her fingers twitched at her side.

She thought of Sombra again. Of that last moment, the whiplash turn in her voice, the way she’d said Hana should go. That she was safer without her. Then vanished like she’d never existed.

Hana had replayed it in her head every night since.

She’d begged herself to be angry. But all she could feel now, standing here, was hollow.

What if Sombra was really gone?

What if she was back here in this polished, bright world, alone?

A noise buzzed from her holophone. A scheduled reminder for the appearance — bright text and a cheerful chime. “GO LIVE: 60 seconds.”

It cut straight through her thoughts.

The assistant was watching again, waiting, his polite expression now threaded with concern. “Miss Song…? Are you alright?”

She forced her hand away from the wall and folded both arms in front of herself, one hand gripping the other tightly at the wrist.

“I’m fine,” she said, too quickly.

He didn’t believe her.

She didn’t believe herself.

But she walked forward anyway, each step practiced, controlled. Her chin lifted. Her eyes fixed forward. She passed through the curtain of light that marked the stage entrance, heart screaming beneath her composed smile.

And then D.Va was back.

The crowd roared.

The bright stage lights hit her like heat.

Hana blinked into the crowd, their faces blurred under the glare. Phones lifted. Camera flashes sparked. Reporters leaned forward in anticipation. The giant MEKA logo gleamed behind her in bright blue steel, flanked by banners of her mech in mid-flight — heroic, untouchable, perfect.

She walked to the podium like a ghost slipping into an old skin.

The applause rang out. She smiled.

But it didn’t reach her eyes.

Lieutenant Colonel Myung stood just to her left. Stoic. Commanding. He nodded slightly when she took her place, and she gave the small, rehearsed bow — polished to perfection.

The speech script glowed on the panel in front of her.

“Thank you for the warm welcome. It’s… good to be back.”

Polite claps.

“After the events in Busan, I needed time to recover. Physically, yes. But also mentally. MEKA has stood behind me through this, and I’m proud to return with even stronger resolve.”

The words felt like paper in her mouth.

“I want to extend my thanks to those who reached out. Who supported me when I needed it most. To my team. To my fans. You gave me the strength to keep going.”

She felt sick.

Because they didn’t know.

They didn’t know about the sleepless nights. The lies she agreed to repeat. The footage of Sombra’s body against cold metal that still haunted the edges of her vision every time she blinked. They didn’t know what MEKA had buried. What Sombra had helped her uncover.

They didn’t know she was still waiting for someone who might never return.

Her hands tightened on the sides of the podium, hidden from the audience. Her nails bit into her gloves.

“We are already preparing for any future threats. The Gwishin may have struck hard, but we will strike back harder. Together, we protect Korea. Together, we rise.”

The applause was louder now. Roaring. People cheered. Chanted her name.

D.Va. D.Va. D.Va.

She bowed again, smiled, posed for the camera flashes. Beside her, Myung gave a short, proud statement to the press about MEKA’s resilience. A reporter shouted a question about her training regimen, and Hana answered automatically — a joke here, a grin there, the practiced rhythm of public relations.

Inside, her heart thudded with grief.

When it was finally over, when the lights dimmed and the cameras turned away, she let out a quiet breath like she’d been holding it all hour. Her cheeks ached from forced smiles.

She stepped off stage, the crowd’s noise fading behind her. Somewhere behind a column, she stopped.

Closed her eyes.

And pressed her palm against the wall again.

Another day pretending.

Another day without a sign.

Another day Sombra didn’t come back.

The moment Hana stepped back into her quarters, the door hissed shut with a satisfying finality. Outside, cameras still buzzed from the press line, fans still cheered in filtered loops online. But inside, it was just her. Silence and a sharp tension behind her eyes.

She peeled off her jacket with rigid fingers and tossed it onto the nearby chair. Her hair still held the shine from stylist product; her face was still perfect under the makeup. But none of it could disguise the tightness in her chest.

The holoscreen flickered on automatically to the MEKA channel, filling the quiet with its usual curated noise.

"—Anonymous hackers have reportedly breached a Swiss data vault formerly operated by Overwatch Intelligence. The source, while unofficial, describes a sophisticated intrusion using advanced cloaking protocols and recursive masking, reminiscent of Talon infiltration methods. The identity of the hacker remains unknown. No public claim has been made."

Hana stood frozen, halfway through removing her gloves. She slowly turned to face the screen.

There it was. Clear as day.

Sombra’s signature style — but… no calling card. No glitchy skull. No smug “hello.”

Nothing.

Her hands clenched around the gloves.

She sat slowly on the edge of her bed, eyes locked on the scrolling footage. The screen showed a grainy still of the breached facility — lines of old Overwatch tech, long-abandoned, glowing faintly under emergency lights. The voiceover droned on about geopolitical risks, increased encryption across intelligence networks, the usual blah-blah for public consumption.

But Hana wasn’t listening anymore.

Her mind screamed with possibilities.

Was it her? Was she sending a message? Was she trying to say she’s okay? Or… was it just someone else?

And then, the coldest thought yet:

What if she really left? What if I was just a game to her?

Her throat felt raw as she tried to swallow it down.

“I thought you said you don’t play with people,” she whispered aloud. Her voice cracked.

The screen flashed to the next segment. She turned it off.

In the stillness, Hana sat hunched forward, elbows on her knees, hands trembling. Her eyes were hot but no tears came — just the burning pressure of emotion choking on its own knot.

She leaned back, letting her head hit the wall behind her bed. A sigh fell out of her chest.

She hadn’t realized how much she’d been waiting.

Waiting to see the skull. A ping. A glitch.

Something.

Anything.

She rubbed her eyes roughly with the heel of her palm. Then lay down sideways, curling toward the edge of the bed as her thoughts raced with resentment, confusion, and a painful, hollow kind of hope.

If that was Sombra… why didn’t she leave a sign?

And if it wasn’t…

Then where the hell was she?

And it all repeated. Hana losing track of time and making herself busy with public appearances and streaming. Failed attempts at keeping her mind distracted. Weeks went by. Moments of hope that fizzled out before they even got lit. 

Her schedule becoming mind numbing and empty. Body on autopilot. Working purely on habit. 

Even now as the moonlight seeped through her window was dull, washed out by the pale gleam of city lights. The room, once her sanctuary, now felt like a pressure cooker. Quiet. Too quiet.

Her fingers hovered above the console, casting a faint glow on her face as she stared at the open window of the encrypted chat — their chat. Hana hadn’t touched it in days. Couldn’t bear to look.

Now it sat open, mocking her.

The glitchy skull icon still blinked faintly in the corner, timestamped from almost a month ago. The last and only real sign Sombra had ever left her.

Nothing since.

Hana sat curled in her desk chair, an untouched energy drink sweating on the corner of her desk. The taste of exhaustion clung to her mouth, bitter and dry. Her body was drained — a slurry of early morning training, interviews, simulations, streaming, smiling, waving, nodding.

Every day like a metronome. Every smile a little more forced.

She leaned forward and rested her head in her hands, fingers tangling into her hair.

Twenty-seven days. Twenty-seven nights.

Not a glitch. Not a message. Not a sign.

She’d checked the news feeds daily — even the encrypted backchannels Sombra had once showed her. Nothing. No whisper, no rumor. Sombra hadn’t ghosted the world — she’d vanished from it.

And maybe that was the answer. Maybe Hana had let herself believe too much in something that was never meant to last.

You’re such an idiot, she thought bitterly. She warned you what she was. A liar. A ghost. A criminal.

Her gaze drifted back to the chat. Cursor blinking. Waiting.

She clicked into the menu, hand trembling slightly as the “Delete Channel” option appeared in stark red.

Confirmation required.

Her thumb hovered over the confirm button.

She inhaled sharply.

And hesitated.

Her chest ached, her breath catching.

She couldn’t do it.

Not yet.

Hana slammed the console shut, the screen snapping to black. She shoved the chair back with a hard scrape and paced the room like a caged animal.

Her pulse thundered in her ears. Grief had long since turned into frustration. Now it was curdling into resentment.

Why did she come into my life?

Why did she help me, if she was just going to leave?

Why did I believe her?

And the worst one, the one she never dared say aloud:

Why does it hurt so much?

She stopped in front of the mirror and caught her reflection — wide-eyed, disheveled, raw. Not D.Va. Not the poster girl. Just Hana. Bruised by silence.

She exhaled through her nose, shaking her head. "Get it together, Song," she muttered. “You survived worse than this.”

And maybe that was true.

But never quite like this.

The next night all the same.

Rain again. A gentle tap against the windows, not loud enough to disturb the silence, but persistent — like the ache in Hana’s chest she still couldn’t name. The kind that pressed down on her lungs when she was alone, long after the cameras turned off and the suit was unzipped and folded away like another skin she no longer wanted to wear.

She sat on the floor in oversized sweats, legs crossed, a half-finished bag of chips next to her, the TV playing some over-produced variety show she wasn’t watching. Her holophone rested beside her, screen dimmed, the small skull icon tucked away in the corner of the main menu — hidden like a wound under gauze.

She’d left the chat closed tonight.

No notifications. No glitches. Just silence.

Her fingers tapped at her knuckles again. Again. And again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The messages were still there. Her words. The questions she’d asked and never gotten answers to. A moment she cracked and gave in, sending sporadic and desperate messages to their chat. 

Things like:

"Are you okay?"

"Was it something I said?"

"Did I do something wrong?"

And then, later:

"I trusted you."

"You could’ve just said goodbye."

She’d almost deleted.

Almost.

Instead, she’d re-read them in a haze, like reading her own grief backwards, wondering what version of herself thought Sombra would respond.

The girl who asked those questions? She didn’t feel like Hana anymore. She felt like a ghost of someone Sombra had touched and disappeared from.

Her gaze drifted toward her streaming rig, sitting idle and dark. Her contract had her back online tomorrow night — a big Q&A stream with fans.

The promo posters made her nauseous.

D.Va was back. Apparently.

And Sombra was still gone.

Hana pulled a blanket over her legs and leaned back against the wall. She closed her eyes, listening to the rain. Just the rain. The show fading out to the sound.

"I hate you," she whispered into the dark.

It came out fragile. Soft.

Like maybe it wasn’t hate at all.

A faint buzz from her desk. Just her holophone shifting from an old notification. Nothing new. Nothing that mattered.

The room settled into silence again.

Hana let her eyes fall shut. Her mind drifted.

And for the first time in weeks, she didn’t dream of the Gwishin, or fire, or broken metal.

She dreamt of violet code across black glass.

A laugh in her ear.

A coat draped over her shoulders.

A hand that almost reached hers — and didn’t.

A low ping broke the silence.

Hana stirred, brows pulling together, eyes still closed. Another ping — sharper this time. Her holophone lit up dimly from her side on the floor. A pale glow against the shadows of her room.

She blinked herself awake.

The blanket tangled around her legs, a half-eaten protein bar near the edge of the bed. Her energy drink still remaining untouched.

Her mouth tasted stale. Her limbs felt heavy.

The screen showed no incoming call. No chat request.

Just one blinking icon.

Encrypted Signal Received.

Her blood ran cold.

She sat up fast, the blanket falling off her shoulders. Her heart was thudding now — slow at first, then faster. She picked up the holophone with shaking hands, the unopened can falling over and rolling towards the far end of the room.

The skull was back.

It pulsed once, violet on black.

Hana swallowed hard. A mix of emotions at once. Relieved. Surprised. Angry.

Relieved that Sombra had finally reached out and shown proof of life. Surprised that she even did reach out. Angry that she kept quiet from her for so long.

Anger rearing it's ugly head first as her brows furrowed. A part of her mind ready to give everything that she has been holding in out at Sombra.

 And shaking hands tapped it open.

For a moment, it was just static — screen flickering, catching, unreadable code dancing across the edges. Then the signal stabilized, and her heart stopped.

Sombra.

She looked wrecked.

Hana staggered back a step.

The camera angle was off, tilted — like it had been propped up haphazardly. Sombra sat slouched against a filthy concrete wall, one shoulder visibly dislocated, arm twisted behind her, likely restrained.

Her face was bruised nearly beyond recognition — one eye swollen shut, the skin around it black and purple. Her cheek was split open, blood dried down her jawline and neck. A cut above her brow still dripped sluggishly, and her lip was torn nearly in half.

One of her augments along her temple sparked faintly — a loop of code blinking red. Damaged. Compromised.

Her breathing was ragged. Shallow. Painful.

And yet… she smiled.

A ghost of a grin. Teeth red.

A red string of text appearing on the bottom.

“This is what backstabbers receive.”

The words hit Hana like ice water.

The sound of metal dragging echoed offscreen — restraints, chains, something too heavy. The light flickered. The feed jittered again.

And in the last second before the signal gave out, Sombra’s eyes locked onto the camera — soft, raw, human. A silent message behind the pain.

Her lips moved — no sound came through.

Then the screen cut to black.

No prompt. No retry. Just gone.

Hana stood frozen, the holophone gripped tightly in her shaking hands.

Her stomach twisted. The room felt too small. Her breath hitched in her throat.

She blinked — once, twice — and realized her eyes were wet.

She’s alive. But barely.

Every instinct screamed move.

Chapter Text

The holophone slid from Hana’s grip, clattering to the floor. She didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Her legs had turned to lead. Her lungs felt shallow — like breathing too deep might shatter her from the inside. She stared at the blank screen where Sombra’s battered face had just been, still seeing it burned into her retinas. The blood. The chains. The whisper of a smile.

She collapsed to her knees.

A sob tore from her throat before she could stop it. Sharp, cracked — the kind that made her double over, hands clutched to her chest like she could hold the pain in place. Like she could stop her heart from bleeding out right there on the floor.

She tried to tell herself it was shock. That this was just another twisted mind game. Another mask.

But no mask looked like that.

Sombra had been broken. And even still — she'd smiled. At her.

The one person who might’ve seen it coming. The one person who should have done something sooner.

“This is what backstabbers receive.”

The words wouldn't leave her.

She curled tighter, fists clenched against the cold floor. Tears slipped silently down her cheeks as her mind churned, replaying the moment she had last seen Sombra — the way she’d turned away, shut down. The way Hana had let her.

And now she was paying for it. Alone.

The silence after the transmission was deafening.

Hana stayed on her knees, breath caught somewhere in her throat, heart hammering so hard it hurt. Her skin felt too tight. Her body wasn’t her own — like she’d been unplugged, left blinking and raw in the aftermath of something she couldn’t undo.

Then the air shifted.

Her chest caved in, lungs seizing. Her hands began to tremble, barely perceptible at first — then violently, fingers twitching like they couldn’t hold onto anything solid anymore.

It was happening again.

She couldn’t breathe.

She couldn’t breathe—

Her hand scrambled out, grabbing at the base of her desk for stability, for anything. Her nails scraped plastic. Her forehead pressed to the cool floor.

Deep breath. In. Out. In. Out.

It didn’t help. It never really did — not when it counted. Not when her brain felt like it was screaming in a hundred voices at once.

"Where is she?"

"How do I find her?"

"She’s hurt. Dying. Maybe already—"

A dry sob caught in her throat.

“What do I do? What do I do what do I do—”

MEKA couldn’t know. They couldn’t. If she brought this forward — if she even hinted at it — she’d be implicating herself in espionage, in treason. There were surveillance logs. Data trails. Streams.

She and Sombra had hacked into MEKA’s most classified systems. They’d uncovered lies that might shake the entire damn nation if exposed. She’d helped a Talon agent — knowingly. She could be discharged, detained. Branded a traitor.

But if she did nothing…

That image would stay in her head forever.

Sombra’s bloodied lip. Her arms bound. Her voice, a whisper. That soft, ghosted smile.

It had been real.

And it had broken her.

Tears slid down Hana’s face as her breath hitched again, body curling into itself. She tried grounding herself — reaching for her usual reflex, thumb tapping against her knuckles. Wishing a rubber band was in her room.

But it was mechanical now. A hollow motion. She couldn’t even feel it through the numbness setting in.

All she could think was:

You left her.

You let her go. You didn’t chase her. You let her believe you’d be safer without her.

And now someone had her. And she might be dying.

And it’s your fault.

Hana stayed there, curled on the floor, cheek against the cold tile. Her breath stuttered in and out, shallow and uneven, chest tight like a vice. Her vision blurred again—not from tears this time, but from the weight of the replay.

“This is what backstabbers receive.”

The way her blood had soaked into her sleeve. The shaky rise and fall of her chest. Her body slumped, tied to something just off-screen. Her half-smile that wasn’t really a smile at all — more like an apology before everything cut to black.

And it just kept playing.

Over.

And over.

And over.

She didn’t even realize she’d opened the file again. Her fingers had moved on their own. Seeking something — proof, clarity, hope — but finding nothing but the same few seconds. That same soft, broken voice.

Hana’s hand hovered over the screen. Trembled. Curled into a fist.

She was Talon.

A cyberterrorist. A manipulator. A walking breach in global security. Every training manual she'd ever been given — every lesson drilled into her from MEKA and the military — had made it clear: people like Sombra don’t get second chances.

People like her were to be taken down.

So why did it feel like someone had ripped out her lungs?

She was supposed to feel relieved, if anything. One less threat. One less liability.

But Hana felt sick.

A deep, aching kind of dread that gnawed through her ribs, up her spine. Because in the short time they'd worked together — amidst the glitches and games, the tension, the snark — Sombra had helped her. Really helped her. She hadn’t needed to stay, hadn’t needed to share anything beyond the bare minimum.

Yet she had. Even when it terrified her.

And despite all her evasions and sharp edges… she'd been human. In ways Hana hadn't expected. That night in the safehouse — her coat draped over Hana’s shoulders. The way she’d explained the infiltration like it was a movie plot to keep her calm. The moment she reached out, silent but present, as Hana broke down in that cold corridor.

Hana swallowed thickly. A sound between a breath and a sob caught in her throat.

Then — like a switch — her mind flashed back.

That terminal.

The low, warning beep from Sombra’s systems. The way her expression had flickered before she shoved the files into Hana’s hands and told her to leave. That distant look in her eyes, like she’d already accepted something she couldn’t say out loud.

“You should go. It's safer for you back at the base.”

Hana’s eyes widened.

Had that beep been an alert? Had someone found them? Was it Talon?

Her thoughts snapped like live wires, one sparking into another. The timeline. The stolen data. Sombra pushing her away. The total radio silence. The glitching in her streams. The static.

She sat upright too quickly. Her vision swam.

None of it had been random.

Someone had known.

And maybe they’d been watching longer than either of them realized.

Her head ached suddenly — a sharp, pulsing pain behind her eyes as she tried to make sense of it all. It was too much. Her thoughts spun out again: What do I do? Who could she trust? What could she say? MEKA? Absolutely not. The press? Unthinkable. No one could know.

She was alone in this.

And Sombra — the only one who might’ve helped her navigate this — was now somewhere she couldn’t reach. Maybe dying. Maybe already—

She closed her eyes hard, biting down on a sob.

The helplessness crushed her.

Hana lay flat on her back, the ceiling above her barely visible in the dimness.

She’d buried herself beneath the blankets, tried everything — deep breathing, holding her plush of B.NY, even replaying old VODs of past streams to numb the static in her brain. But nothing helped. Her mind wouldn’t stop spinning, dragging her through a whirlwind of fear and spiraling what-ifs.

The faint glow of her holophone blinked from the floor.

Still no new message. No trace of the encrypted skull icon.

She rolled over, pulling the covers over her head — as if darkness could somehow shut out the noise inside her. But her heart still pounded. Her chest still ached with every breath she tried to take.

Please… please just sleep…

But every time her eyes closed, the image burned through the dark: Sombra bleeding out, eyes unfocused, trying to smile. Trying to reassure her even as she was being—

Hana bolted upright, gasping.

She shoved the blankets off, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat there in the silence of her quarters. Her hands were shaking again. No amount of control helped now. She pressed her palms into her eyes and held them there until spots bloomed in the blackness.

She couldn’t do this.

She couldn’t do this alone.

The early light was starting to seep through her curtains, washing everything in dull gray. The base would stir soon. Officers and pilots. Protocol and smiles. And she’d be expected to walk into the day like she hadn’t seen everything fall apart in front of her.

Her jaw clenched.

Hana pushed up from the bed with sudden resolve. Her legs were shaky, her hair a mess, and her mind still scattered, but she didn’t care. She grabbed a hoodie off the back of her chair, stuffed her holopad into her pocket, and slipped on her shoes with trembling fingers.

There was only one person in this entire compound she could go to.

Only one who might believe her without question. Who would listen without judging her sanity. Who cared about her, not just D.Va.

Dae-Hyun.

She moved quickly down the early morning corridors, ducking past cleaning drones and half-awake guards. Every footstep echoed more loudly than she liked, but no one stopped her. A few even nodded, probably assuming she was headed to early training.

Her heart thudded louder with each step — not from the exertion, but from the growing weight of what she was about to say.

She’d have to tell him everything.

Well… not everything. But enough.

Enough to break every protocol she’d ever been bound to.

She reached the garage entrance and palmed open the door.

Dae-Hyun’s workspace was quiet. The lights were dim, one flickering softly above the back bench where a power core hummed in sleep mode. A tool cart was half-open. His mug from last night still sat untouched beside his notes.

She knew the smell of this room — metal, ozone, oil. Familiar. Safe.

“Dae?” Her voice came out small.

There was a shuffle, a grunt, and then he appeared from around the corner of the mech housing bay, rubbing his eyes and wearing a hoodie three sizes too big.

“Hana?” He blinked. “What are you—? It’s not even six—”

“I need your help,” she blurted, her voice cracking on the last word.

That caught him.

His expression shifted immediately — concern washing away the sleep.

“What happened?” he asked, stepping closer. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer at first. Just looked at him — really looked at him — and something inside her finally snapped under the pressure.

Her eyes welled, her lip trembling.

“I… I think someone’s in trouble,” she whispered. “And I can’t tell anyone. I don’t know who else to go to.”

Dae-Hyun’s face went still. But not in fear — in focus.

He reached forward and set a steadying hand on her shoulder.

“You came to the right place,” he said softly. “Show me everything.”

Hana stood next to Dae-Hyun’s desk, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as she stared down at her holopad.

She hesitated, thumb hovering over the locked folder.

Once you open this, there’s no going back.

She looked at him. Dae-Hyun, her oldest friend, the one constant in the chaos. His brow was furrowed, but not with judgment — just concern. He waited, giving her the space she needed.

She swallowed hard, then tapped in the passcode.

The video blinked to life.

Flickering, broken. Grainy feed. And there — there — was Sombra, bloodied and bruised, slumped against concrete, arm limp, face pale beneath the smeared black and purple of makeup and dried blood. The haunting echo of chains came next, warped through static.

Her broken smile.

The screen cutting to black.

Hana paused it with a shaking hand.

She couldn’t bring herself to look at it again.

“I—I didn’t know she was going to send that,” she said, the words tumbling out, breath fast and uneven. “I didn’t even know she could. If she even did. We hadn’t spoken in weeks—she pushed me away—told me to go back to base—and then nothing.”

She forced herself to meet his gaze.

“I know it looks bad. She’s Talon. She’s a hacker. She’s… everything we’re supposed to stop. But Dae… she helped me. She helped us. And she didn’t have to.”

Dae-Hyun was quiet.

So she kept going.

“She helped me uncover things MEKA was hiding — horrible things, connected to the Gwishin attacks. I couldn’t tell anyone. And she knew. She knew the risks just working with me, and she still…” Her voice cracked. “She still did it.”

She looked down, nails digging into her sleeves.

“And now she’s gone. And I don’t know who has her, or if she’s even still—” She caught the sob before it escaped, biting down hard.

Dae-Hyun stared at the paused video, his face unreadable.

The hologram faded, leaving only its ghost — a lingering image in Hana’s mind of Sombra’s broken body, that final crooked smile burned into her retinas.

She looked to him, desperate for something — understanding, agreement, anything.

“I need help.” she repeated.

His jaw was clenched, the muscle ticking.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low. Controlled. Measured.

“You’re trying to help a Talon operative.”

Hana flinched. The help he expressed vanished in a blink of an eye.

“I know how it looks—”

“No.” His voice cut sharper. “You don’t. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be standing here, asking me to be complicit.”

He stepped back, his expression unreadable.

“She’s Talon, Hana. It doesn’t matter what she helped you find. It doesn’t change what she’s done — or what she is. You think just because she saved your ass, she’s suddenly someone you can trust?”

“She earned that trust,” Hana snapped. “You didn’t see what I saw—what we found—”

“I don’t want to see it.”

That stopped her cold.

He sighed, hands at his sides, fingers twitching as if he didn’t know what to do with them. “I care about you, Hana. I always have. But this… this crosses a line. A big one. You shouldn’t have gotten involved with her at all.”

Her throat tightened. “So that’s it?”

“I’m not going to report you,” he said. “I won’t do that. But I can’t help you either. Not with this. Not with her.”

“Why?” she asked, quietly, painfully. “Because it’s not clean? Because it doesn’t fit in your idea of what’s right?”

He looked at her then — not angry, just tired.

“Because if you trust the wrong person, you don’t just end up hurt. You end up dead.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

Then Dae-Hyun turned and walked away, leaving Hana standing alone in the soft glow of her holopad, the ghost of Sombra’s smile still burning behind her eyes.

The door to Dae-Hyun’s workshop hissed shut behind her.

Hana stood there for a moment in the sterile hallway, eyes locked on the floor. The hum of overhead lights, the distant clatter of footsteps down another corridor — they all faded into a dull, meaningless buzz in her ears.

She felt… unreal.

Like she was floating outside her own body.

Like none of this should be happening.

She had gone there with hope — desperate, fragile hope — clinging to the idea that someone would see what she saw. That someone would understand.

But Dae-Hyun hadn’t.

He hadn’t even tried.

“She’s Talon.”

“You shouldn’t have gotten involved with her.”

The words dug in deep. They’d sounded like concern, but they felt like betrayal.

Her legs moved before she could think, taking her down the corridor, away from the light of his workroom, away from the warmth of someone she thought would never turn his back on her. She didn’t even know where she was going. She just needed to move.

Her breath quickened as she turned another corner.

Her hands were cold.

Her chest tightened.

There was no one else.

Overwatch would never believe her — or worse, they’d believe her and turn their attention on her. MEKA already watched her like a hawk. And now Dae-Hyun, her oldest friend, the one person she thought would see her through anything — he had drawn the line.

Because she’d cared.

Because she had the audacity to believe someone from Talon could be more than what the world had labeled them.

Her pace slowed. She leaned against a wall, hugging herself as a trembling breath escaped.

“What the hell am I doing…” she whispered.

Sombra was somewhere out there, possibly dying. Hana had seen the blood. The bruises. The chains. That had been real. It was real.

But what could she do?

She wasn’t a hacker. She wasn’t a spy. She was a pilot. A face. A symbol. One they would tear down the moment they found out she’d gone rogue.

And yet — she couldn’t do nothing.

She slid down the wall to the floor, pressing her back against the cold metal. Her legs curled to her chest. She didn’t cry. There was nothing left to cry with. Just the throb in her head and the storm spiraling in her chest.

She’d never felt this alone.

And still, beneath all of it — the fear, the confusion, the guilt — one truth kept surfacing like a whisper under water:

Sombra didn’t deserve this.

And Hana couldn't — wouldn’t — let that transmission be the end.

Even if it meant doing it alone.

The hallway had emptied. The base never truly slept, but this wing was quiet — a side corridor used mostly by maintenance or night patrols. No one passed by. No one called her name.

It was just her. And silence.

Hana sat slouched against the cold wall, arms looped around her knees, gaze unfocused. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been there. Five minutes. Thirty. Maybe more.

Time had started to feel irrelevant.

There was no notification ping. No flicker of a skull icon. No purple glitch in her peripherals.

Nothing.

She reached for her holopad again — not to check for messages this time, but out of habit. Out of some hope that maybe if she stared at the same screens long enough, something would change.

But it didn’t.

She scrolled through the chat log — her and Sombra’s private encrypted thread. The last thing Sombra ever said to her was a short line about laying low. That, and the coldness in her tone that still stung if Hana read it too closely.

She had read it at least twenty times since Sombra vanished.

Now she read it again.

And again.

Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, wanting to type something — anything — but she couldn’t bring herself to send it.

What would she even say?

Are you even still alive?

She hated how the question felt. Like saying it might make it true.

Hana exhaled slowly and leaned her head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling.

The fluorescent lights buzzed gently overhead. Her own reflection faintly shimmered in a small wall panel across from her — messy hair, sunken eyes, dark circles. She barely recognized herself.

Not D.Va. Not the pilot. Not the hero.

Just a girl who lost someone — and no one knew.

No one cared.

Dae-Hyun had been her last hope. And he didn’t even look angry — just… disappointed. The kind of disappointment that felt worse than a scolding.

She felt like a child again. Like she'd made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed.

She felt like a child again. Like she'd made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed.

And yet, the image of Sombra’s broken body played again in her mind, unrelenting. No matter how hard she tried to push it away.

She blinked, eyes heavy, not from sleep but from exhaustion.

Mental. Emotional. Soul-deep.

Her breath came slower now, a dull ache settling into her chest like a bruise that would never fully fade.

Maybe Dae-Hyun was right.

Maybe this wasn’t her fight.

But why, then, did it feel like it was hers more than anyone’s?

Because Sombra hadn’t trusted anyone else. Because she didn’t have anyone else. Because for all her secrets and sharp edges, she’d reached out to Hana — and only Hana — before everything went dark.

And no matter what the world said, that meant something.

Hana stayed sitting there until the hallway lights dimmed for morning shift. Until she was the only one still not moving.

And when she finally did rise, something inside her had begun to quiet.

Not the fear.

But the clarity.

The door to her quarters slid open with a soft hiss, and Hana stepped inside like a ghost.

She didn’t turn the lights on.

The low ambient glow from her monitor screens and the soft pulse of the standby holopad was enough to guide her across the room. The door closed behind her, sealing her into solitude again — the one place no one could demand anything from her.

Her trophies sat lined on the far wall, polished and perfect, untouched.

Mocking her.

They didn’t mean anything tonight.

She dropped into her desk chair with a soft exhale, pulling her legs up beneath her. Her hair was a mess, her hoodie wrinkled, and her hands still carried the faint shake of what she hadn’t fully processed. But her mind, despite the exhaustion, was already working.

She wouldn’t want you to give up.

Hana reached for her holopad and linked it with her desk terminal.

A clean login screen blinked to life. She tapped through, fingers flying out of muscle memory. File access. Network tunnel. Trace routing logs. She was no expert, not like Sombra, but she’d done her fair share of modding. Built her own anti-cheat firewalls. Helped debug MEKA’s outdated systems on missions when the tech team couldn’t keep up.

She knew enough.

Enough to start.

She opened the transmission folder — the one Sombra’s message had detonated into — and began combing through the metadata. The file was encrypted five different ways, but Hana knew how to look for a footprint. Sombra always left one. A pattern in the junk code. A tagged byte in the shell header. A hidden signature in the audio static.

Her screen filled with lines of raw data, overlapping pings, distortion patterns, obfuscated file origins.

She leaned in.

Come on. Give me something.

A few hours ago, she would’ve looked at this and felt overwhelmed — powerless.

But now? Now it just looked like a challenge.

The clock ticked silently across the screen. It was still early. She hadn’t slept. Her body screamed for rest, but her mind kept clawing forward. She scribbled a note on a nearby pad. Froze a frame of the video, enhancing the flickering background. Searched for reflection, location cues. Traced packet delivery paths backward to possible sources.

Nothing concrete.

But something faint.

A relay ping from outside Korea. Asia-Pacific sector. The line was dirty, likely routed through three or four backdoors to throw off anyone too lazy to care.

But Hana cared.

Her cursor hovered over the fragment of a code tag.

A smile flickered across her face — tired, bitter, but real.

Sombra did leave her something. A tiny echo of her own code, buried deep where only someone truly looking would find it.

She whispered under her breath. “Thank you.”

It wasn’t much. But it was a start.

And more than that — it was proof.

Sombra hadn’t given up. She wanted to be found.

Hana leaned back in her chair, exhaling slowly as she stared at the terminal screen, its dim light casting harsh shadows across her room.

You're not Sombra.

But you’re not helpless either.

Her fists clenched in her lap.

She’d figure out what to do with this trail.

But right now, she let herself feel something she hadn’t dared to since the transmission:

Purpose.

However, her duties came first.

Her holopad buzzed with an urgent ping from command. A red-priority schedule update: training session rescheduled, public demo approved, media prep briefing in thirty.

No. Not today.

She blinked at the message, then at the terminal still running before her. Her heart dropped.

She’d planned to dive deeper. She needed to.

But duty clawed her back.

Her fingers hovered over the holopad, instinct screaming to delay, to lie, to say she was sick, injured, anything — but she knew better. That would only draw attention. After last month’s incident, MEKA’s eyes were all over her. No more second chances. Not without questions.

So she stood.

Changed into her uniform.

Tied her hair back into the perfect D.Va half-ponytail.

She glanced once more at the terminal. Her fingers twitched with the urge to sit back down and keep going. Just a few more minutes, another file query — anything.

But instead, she forced herself to turn and walk out.

The makeup chair smelled like antiseptic wipes and foundation.

Hana sat motionless as the stylist applied a soft gloss to her lips, adding a bit more shimmer than usual. “They said they want you to really pop this time,” she chirped. “All the international cameras are tuned in again. Ratings are way up!”

Hana managed a nod.

Pop.

That was all she was — a color on a screen, a mascot in a perfectly tailored flight suit. While somewhere else, Sombra was bleeding.

The stylist moved to her hair. Hana’s eyes drifted to the mirror.

D.Va stared back at her.

Her smile was perfect.

Her eyes were empty.

The press conference was brief. The questions weren’t.

“Can you tell us more about your recovery after the incident in Busan?”

“I’m grateful for the support I received. MEKA’s medical team was incredible.”

“Will we see you back in full combat duty soon?”

“I’m back in the skies already,” she answered. Lies they handed me in a script.

“And the recent Gwishin readings? Are you afraid of a new wave?”

The crowd leaned forward.

She kept smiling.

“I’ve never been afraid of a challenge.”

Later, during her live training simulation — a public “confidence showcase” — Hana climbed into the cockpit of her MEKA unit. The moment the hatch sealed, her breath caught.

It was too quiet in here.

Too much like the moment before it all fell apart last time.

Her gloved fingers hovered over the startup commands. She could feel the sweat on her back, even in the chill of the suit. The hum of the cockpit systems felt like it was pressing in on her, not lifting her up.

What if it happens again?

She started the mech anyway.

The crowd outside cheered.

Hana flew through the demo with the same practiced precision she always had. The same choreography. The same smile. Only now, it all felt heavier. Hollow.

Because all she could think about was how her hands should be flying over a keyboard, not a targeting joystick.

That she should be tracing the trail left behind by someone who risked everything.

Not performing for cameras.

As the day wound down and her final meeting let out, Hana walked the long hallway back to her room in silence. She ignored the greetings. The compliments. The military brass telling her how proud they were of her “discipline” and “growth.”

They didn’t see the anger simmering beneath the surface.

They didn’t know she’d been lying all day.

When her door slid shut behind her, she didn’t even stop to breathe.

She threw off her jacket, dropped into her desk chair, and reactivated her terminal.

She’d played her part.

Now she was done pretending.

Her terminal flared back to life, already primed from the night before. She slipped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones, more for focus than sound, and started patching into the wider satellite net. Not MEKA’s servers this time.

Overwatch’s.

It was risky.

Stupid, even.

But she needed more. What she found last night pointed to something global — too far beyond Korea’s reach. And if anyone had access to those black-site locations, the encrypted chatter hubs, the underground Talon tracking logs, it was Overwatch.

And Overwatch had firewalls built by the best of the best.

Hana wasn’t Sombra.

But she was fast.

Her hands flew across the keys, rerouting her signal through a MEKA dummy node, then bouncing it across a commercial relay drone to mimic a low-priority ping. She slipped past the surface-level authentication, a clean request to the archives — standard search protocols — and embedded her query in the packet’s tail, just like Sombra had taught her.

It was messy, but disguised well enough.

At least, she hoped so.

The system lagged. Then responded. She was in — temporarily.

Data crawled across her screen. Coded manifests. Mission summaries. Off-the-record communications between field agents, all scrubbed of names and timestamps but still rich with information. She filtered for anything related to Sombra. Talon movement in the Asia-Pacific region. Unauthorized signals intercepted in the last two weeks.

Her pulse hammered in her ears.

She didn’t notice the second login attempt at first.

Just a flicker in the corner of the screen. A strange anomaly — too fast to be a regular node ping. Her eyes locked onto the console log. A ghost signal bounced off hers.

Someone had noticed.

Her breath caught.

She killed the connection immediately, but the tracer had already hit her session.

“Shit.”

Her screen locked. Then flickered.

For a moment, she saw nothing.

And then: a white hexagonal warning emblem bloomed on her screen — not MEKA’s.

“Unauthorized access detected. Connection terminated. Review pending.”

Hana’s stomach twisted.

She backed away from the desk, heart hammering, palms cold.

She’d tripped something.

Not a full red-flag — yet. But someone on the other end had seen her. Maybe not enough to pinpoint who she was, but enough to know someone was trying to reach places they shouldn’t.

“Come on, Hana,” she whispered to herself. “Think.”

She stood there for a full minute, willing herself to breathe.

There was no knock on her door.

No sirens.

Not yet.

But the clock had started ticking.

She was sure of it now — she couldn’t do this alone much longer.

And whoever was watching… they knew she was looking.

Hana didn’t sleep.

She hadn’t even moved from her desk chair. The monitor’s glow still cast deep shadows across her tired features. Her eyes burned, her hands curled into fists in her lap.

A second night of no sleep.

She’d failed.

Whoever monitored the Overwatch archives had seen her.

The second the warning emblem appeared, it was over.

And yet… nothing happened. No alarms. No knocks at her door. Not yet.

Maybe they didn’t trace it.

Maybe they weren’t sure it was her.

Maybe she still had time.

But even that shred of hope was growing thinner by the hour.

She stared at the terminal, the encryption window blinking softly, still open to her chat with Sombra — a log now devoid of life. Silent.

The same way it had been for nearly a month.

“Where are you?” she whispered into the stillness. Her voice was hoarse.

She’d tried everything she could think of on her own. But she wasn’t Sombra. She didn’t have the reach, the tools, the backdoors into blacksite servers. What she did have was courage — and just enough recklessness — to get herself into trouble.

And that left her with only one real option now.

She needed help.

Not from Dae-Hyun.

Not from MEKA.

From Overwatch.

Her heart pounded as she stared down at her holopad, thumb hovering over the contact list. Her mind spun with doubts.

They’d never believe her.

They’d see Sombra and immediately shut down. Talon wasn’t something they entertained half-truths about — especially from someone who already had a complicated track record.

But she couldn’t ignore what she’d seen in that video.

The pain.

The blood.

The smile.

This is what backstabbers receive.

Her thumb slid over the interface. She scrolled past Soldier: 76. Past Winston. Past Brigitte.

Then paused.

Angela Ziegler — Mercy.

She was the only one who might even try to listen. She had seen war, loss, and recovery. And somewhere deep down, Hana remembered how Mercy had once looked at her during a visit to Busan — not as a symbol, but as a person.

Her thumb hovered.

Her stomach twisted.

She tapped the screen.

[Encrypted Message Sent]

“Dr. Ziegler. I know I’m not supposed to use this channel… but I need help.

This isn’t about MEKA.

It’s about someone who’s going to die unless I do something.

Please. Just give me a chance to explain.

— Hana”

The message sent.

No take-backs. No hiding now.

She closed her eyes, slumping back into her chair as the tension finally broke like a wave over her.

She didn’t know if anyone would respond.

But she was done waiting.

Hana sat at the edge of her bed, her elbows on her knees, hands trembling slightly as she tried — and failed — to lace her boots without fumbling.

Her holopad lay beside her, the message to Mercy still marked as “sent,” but unread.

Her brain wouldn’t stop tracking that status. Every few seconds, she glanced over, waiting for the symbol to shift. For any change. For a response.

Nothing.

She forced herself up. You have duties today, she reminded herself. You can’t fall apart now.

The mirror reflected a shell of herself — uniform pressed, hair neat, expression composed. But the dark circles under her eyes were deeper than makeup could hide. Her eyes were glassy. Skin pale.

She left her room with the pad still in her pocket, silenced but within reach.

The first stop was another public training display — this time a live-fire test for MEKA recruits. She stood on the field in her flight suit, answering questions, giving instructions, eyes flicking up to the skies every few seconds.

As if something might fall out of the clouds and change everything.

She caught herself spacing out more than once. Her speech slipped. She fumbled a response about formation tactics, and one of the rookies tilted their head at her.

“You okay, Captain?”

“Yeah,” she lied, smiling like her jaw wasn’t clenched. “Just tired.”

Later, in the ops room, she sat through another intelligence briefing. It was almost surreal how calmly they discussed threat levels, Gwishin projections, and border tensions — like the world wasn’t rotting behind closed doors.

Every digital screen she glanced at made her stomach turn.

Every file that wasn’t from Sombra felt like a failure.

Her foot tapped rapidly under the table.

Still no message.

When her shift finally ended, she walked the long hallway back to her quarters with a dragging gait. She waved off Dae-Hyun again without looking him in the eye. Her fingers itched to check her pad.

As soon as the door closed behind her, she yanked it out of her pocket and opened the encrypted channel.

Still.

Just “sent.”

No read receipt.

She dropped the pad onto her desk and leaned both hands on the surface, trying to breathe. Her chest was tight. Her temples ached. Her stomach hadn’t held anything solid in twelve hours.

Her vision blurred — from the tears or the exhaustion, she couldn’t tell.

Sombra was still out there, hurt.

And Hana was breaking apart trying to figure out how to save someone who might already be gone.

She collapsed onto her bed sideways, fully clothed, staring blankly at the ceiling. The ceiling fan spun. The soft hum of her room filled the silence.

Her pad vibrated once.

She sat up like she’d been electrocuted, heart racing.

But it wasn’t Mercy.

It was a system ping. Routine.

Her breath shook as she exhaled, curling into herself and trying to hold it all together.

She hadn’t slept in over forty hours now.

But her mind wouldn’t stop.

Every second of that video kept playing in her head — Sombra, bloodied and broken, forced to look up at the camera, her eyes dim, her smile real.

Why did I let her leave?

Why didn’t I push harder?

What if that was goodbye?

She eventually fell asleep the way storms fade — not peacefully, but because the body has nothing left.

Her holopad sat a foot away, still glowing softly.

The message remained unopened.

Morning blurred into afternoon, or maybe it was the other way around.

Hana couldn’t remember.

She hadn’t left her room.

She hadn’t eaten.

She hadn’t even changed.

The uniform she’d passed out in last night clung uncomfortably to her skin, wrinkled and heavy with the scent of stale anxiety. Her hair stuck to her neck in limp strands. She sat curled up in the desk chair, knees drawn to her chest, blanket half-draped over her like some crumpled flag she no longer served.

The holopad hadn’t made a sound all night.

Not one buzz.

Not one flicker.

Not a damn thing.

Her fingers were sore from checking it, again and again, every ten minutes — sometimes faster — flicking to the encrypted chat, hoping. She’d even started refreshing other messages out of desperation, rereading old ones just to feel something.

Nothing from Mercy.

Nothing from anyone.

This is what backstabbers receive.

That phrase had burned itself into the back of her eyelids, and every time she blinked, she saw it again — overlaid on the image of Sombra’s bloodied face, her half-flickering eyes. The smile.

God, the smile.

She didn’t even like her, not really. That’s what she told herself.

But Hana had trusted her.

And Sombra had trusted her back — trusted her enough to help at all.

And now Hana was left in limbo, choking on her own helplessness, paralyzed by fear and guilt and time. Endless time. Time where Sombra could be suffering. Time where nothing was being done.

Time where she could do nothing.

The day passed in fragmented pieces — gray light sliding across her floor, shifting shapes, drawing and redrawing the outline of her silent failure. By late afternoon, her eyes burned from lack of sleep and too much screen.

She barely noticed the vibration at first.

It buzzed once.

Paused.

Buzzed again — short, sharp, a different tone.

Her eyes darted to the holopad.

Her heart stopped.

A new notification.

Not MEKA. Not a system ping.

ENCRYPTED COMM FROM: DR. A. ZIEGLER

PRIORITY: SECURE

[1 UNREAD MESSAGE]

Her breath caught in her throat. She hesitated for a second — terrified of what it might say. That it was too late. That she was wrong. That Overwatch wouldn’t help. That they would come for her instead.

But her hands moved anyway.

The message opened.

Angela Ziegler [Private]:

Hana.

I received your message. I need to understand more about what you saw. I cannot promise anything until I do — but I’m listening.

Are you able to speak freely?

The words blurred slightly as tears suddenly welled in her eyes. She blinked them back, exhaling a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

Finally.

Finally.

Someone heard her.

The wall she’d been pressing against for weeks — the silence, the judgment, the fear — cracked just enough for a single, golden thread of light to bleed through.

She wasn’t out of the dark yet.

But for the first time in weeks, she wasn’t alone in it.

Her thumbs hovered over the reply window, shaking.

She could barely breathe. The words I’m listening rang in her ears louder than any explosion she’d ever heard in the cockpit.

But now what?

She couldn’t just message back in her room. If anyone at MEKA caught encrypted communications going in or out, especially from her, she'd be red-flagged and locked out of her own systems within the hour. Or worse — dragged in for questioning.

Her door was closed. Locked. But she didn’t trust it. Not after the last few weeks. Not after everything she had touched — data, servers, names.

They’re watching. I know they are.

She rose to her feet slowly. Her knees ached. Her back cracked. Her head throbbed with dehydration and exhaustion. Her vision swam momentarily and she had to brace herself against the wall.

She rose to her feet slowly. Her knees ached. Her back cracked. Her head throbbed with dehydration and exhaustion. Her vision swam momentarily and she had to brace herself against the wall.

Still — she moved.

She changed out of her uniform for the first time in over 24 hours. Pulled on the clothes she wore when she wasn’t D.Va: dark hoodie, loose jeans, boots. Civilian enough to blend in. Forgettable.

She left her holopad locked in her quarters.

She grabbed the old prototype tablet she’d used back when she was upgrading her mech’s OS — not on MEKA’s grid, barely functional, but still had enough processing power and memory to run an encrypted comm line if she piggybacked off a public signal. It would be slow, but clean.

She tucked it under her arm and left her room.

The hallway was quiet.

Too quiet.

A few personnel nodded to her as she passed, but most averted their eyes. Maybe they noticed how pale she looked. Maybe they were still whispering about her breakdown weeks ago. Maybe they knew nothing at all — and that somehow made it worse.

The elevator dinged.

She descended two levels down.

Then walked.

Past the gym. Past the labs. Past the mess hall. To the lower south maintenance corridor — a place only used during simulations or when a coolant pipe burst. It hadn’t been touched in months. She knew it well. She used to go there when she needed to scream.

The lock required a manual override. She used a backdoor keycard she'd swiped during her last engineering mod test.

The heavy door creaked open. She slipped inside.

The air was musty, cold, and thick with the scent of old machine oil. One broken light buzzed overhead. Pipes hissed quietly in the distance. But it was safe.

Alone.

Unwatched.

She sank onto an overturned crate, tablet in her lap, and finally — finally — connected to an off-network signal using a buried hotspot node tied to the city’s infrastructure grid. Something Dae-Hyun helped her build once, back when they were still in sync.

The message from Angela still waited.

Hana exhaled. Pressed her palm to her chest. Fingers tapped against her knuckles instinctively.

You have to do this. It’s now or never.

She began to type.

[Encrypted Reply — From: Hana Song]

“I can speak freely now. No one’s watching.

I have a lot to explain. About Sombra. About what we found.

I know how it looks. But I swear to you, I’m not working with her.

Not anymore. I’m trying to save her.”

The cursor blinked. Then stilled.

She hit send.

Her heart thudded in her chest as she stared at the screen.

Please, believe me.

The message was sent.

All Hana could do now… was wait.

The silence in the old maintenance corridor felt different now. Not empty. Heavy. Like the air had thickened somehow — pressing in from every side, squeezing around her heart.

She sat hunched forward on the crate, elbows on her knees, fingers knit tightly together. Her boots tapped restlessly against the concrete floor, her heel bouncing — a desperate rhythm that tried to match the racing of her thoughts.

The tablet vibrated once.

A new message indicator.

Not a reply.

Just the signal that Mercy had seen the message.

Hana’s chest tightened, sharp and immediate.

She’s reading it. She’s actually reading it.

For a few fragile seconds, Hana felt something like hope unfurl in her chest. Tiny and shaking, but alive. And it scared her.

What if Mercy didn’t believe her?

What if she did — but chose not to act?

What if Hana had already put herself too far over the line to be pulled back?

She swallowed hard, suddenly hyperaware of every sound — the buzz of the broken light above, the whisper of air through the vents, the faint mechanical creaks of old pressure doors settling.

Her eyes flicked back to the screen.

[Dr. Ziegler is typing...]

It blinked, then stopped.

Hana sat up straight, breath caught. Her hands trembled.

It blinked again.

[Dr. Ziegler is typing...]

Then nothing.

Her mind reeled.

What was she typing?

What was she deleting?

What’s taking so long?

She reached up and rubbed her face, pressing her palms hard against her eyes. The tears were close again. Her body was too tired to hold them in, and her thoughts were too fast to silence.

She thought of that transmission again. The bruises on Sombra’s face. The torn metal hanging from her arms like dead limbs. The way her eyes dimmed.

And that stupid, stupid smile she gave at the end — like she knew she was losing, but wanted Hana to remember her anyway.

Hana's throat clenched.

“Idiot,” she whispered, voice cracking. “Why’d you help me? Why didn’t you run?”

The tablet vibrated again.

She whipped her head toward it, eyes wide.

A new message appeared.

[Dr. Angela Ziegler – Encrypted Message]

Hana,

Thank you for trusting me with this. I know how hard that must have been — especially under the circumstances.

You said this isn't about MEKA. That you're not working with her anymore — but you want to help her. I’m not going to pretend that this situation isn’t complicated. Sombra is… dangerous. I know her history, I’ve seen the damage she’s caused. But I’ve also seen the gray between the lines.

You said she helped you. That you uncovered something. If what you’re saying is true, then she may be in danger because of it. And that puts you in danger too.

I won’t alert command. Not yet.

But I need the whole story. All of it.

What exactly did you two find? What makes you believe Talon is responsible for her condition?

And how much of it ties back to you?

If I’m going to help you, Hana — I need the truth. The real one.

No more facades. No more D.Va. Just you.

I’m listening.

—Angela

Hana stared at the message, breath catching in her throat.

Angela wasn’t accusing.

She wasn’t reporting her.

She was asking — for truth.

Not an act. Not a performance. Not D.Va.

Just Hana.

And she didn’t know if she felt relieved… or terrified.

She lowered the tablet into her lap and looked around the old corridor again, as if it could give her the strength to reply — to lay it all bare.

The secret missions. The stolen files. The truth buried beneath MEKA’s public image. Sombra’s help. Her hesitation. Her mistake.

Her part in all of it.

She couldn’t pretend anymore.

The words sat there, waiting.

Hana held the tablet tight, her thumb trembling above the reply box. She was so tired. Tired of lying, tired of acting, tired of carrying the name D.Va like it still fit. It didn’t. Not anymore.

She placed the tablet back on the crate, leaning forward, elbows braced on her thighs. She exhaled shakily, trying to gather her thoughts.

Her fingers hovered over the screen.

And she began to type.

I didn’t plan to work with her. It just… happened. After the Gwishin attack, after I was cleared, I started noticing weird things in MEKA’s logs. Things we were told not to question. Details erased. A mission that doesn’t add up. That I don’t even remember.

Sombra was already in Korea. She found me. Or maybe she was watching. I caught her first. I should’ve reported her, but something in me said not to.

She teased. Flirted. Pushed buttons. But she didn’t lie. Not to me.

Her throat tightened. She hesitated.

I made her help me. I threatened her, practically. But she agreed. We dug into MEKA’s systems together. And what we found… I can’t even explain. They’re covering something up — tech, maybe linked to Talon. Something worse. We barely scratched the surface before she said we had to pull back.

She didn’t tell me why, but I think… I think she was scared.

Hana paused, hands shaking. Her vision blurred.

She pushed me away after that. She told me to leave. I was angry. I didn’t understand why. And then she vanished.

A month went by. Nothing. No word. I thought she ghosted me. I was furious. But then—

Her breath hitched.

The next words didn’t come easy.

She reached up and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, biting back a sob.

“I saw her,” she whispered aloud, the tablet screen swimming in her vision. “She was so hurt, Angela. I didn’t know what to do—”

She slammed her hand against the crate once, not hard, but enough to make the metal echo.

She sniffled and kept typing.

Then the video came. No message. Just her. Bleeding. Hurt. Mechanical parts torn apart. She was forced to look up — like someone made her. There was this message on-screen: “This is what backstabbers receive.”

I think it was Talon. I think they found out she helped me. And now they’re making her pay for it.

I couldn’t go to MEKA. They’d report me. I went to Dae-Hyun and he shut me out. I tried Overwatch’s systems — someone caught me. I have nowhere left to go.

I don’t even know why I care so much.

She was supposed to be the enemy.

A tear slid down her cheek.

She didn’t wipe it away.

The screen blinked.

Angela was typing.

Then — incoming request: encrypted holo-call.

Hana froze.

Her reflection shimmered faintly in the tablet’s black glass. Pale. Tired. Raw.

The name on the screen glowed:

Dr. Angela Ziegler — Incoming Call.

Hana didn’t touch it.

Her hands hovered just above the screen, fingers trembling, chest tight.

A part of her didn’t want to be seen — not like this. Not with her hair a mess and her eyes swollen from crying. Not in a dim maintenance corridor surrounded by dust, dressed like she was hiding from the world.

Because she was.

But more than that, she didn’t want to break in front of someone she respected.

She didn’t want to fall apart in front of Angela Ziegler.

She swallowed thickly, blinking hard. Her thumb finally moved.

She tapped accept.

The screen shimmered once, twice — and then Angela’s calm, luminous face appeared, framed by the soft gold of her hair and a backdrop of a clinical white wall somewhere quiet. Maybe her lab. She looked composed. Professional. But her eyes — her eyes were full of concern the moment they landed on Hana.

She didn’t say hello.

Didn’t ask about the mission.

Didn’t mention Sombra.

She simply blinked, leaned a little closer, and said gently:

“Oh, Hana… you look so tired.”

The words hit harder than Hana expected.

She blinked fast, lips twitching into a wobbly almost-smile. But she didn’t say anything.

Angela continued, her voice warm but firm.

“Are you alright? Have you eaten? Slept?” Her brow furrowed slightly. “How long have you been like this?”

Hana opened her mouth, then hesitated. Her throat burned with the pressure of everything she hadn’t said. She looked down, embarrassed.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, voice soft. “It’s been… a while.”

Angela nodded slowly, the corners of her mouth tightening with concern.

“You didn’t have to carry this alone.”

Hana let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh — bitter, small, and sad.

“There wasn’t anyone left to carry it with.”

There was a pause.

Angela didn’t rush to fill it. She simply looked at Hana — not with judgment, not even with pity — but with quiet, maternal understanding. The kind that said: I see you.

She adjusted slightly in her seat and said, more gently now:

“Then let me help now. Okay? I want to understand everything — but only if you’re up for it. If not, I can wait until you’ve had food, water, rest. You’re not a soldier right now. You’re a person. And people have limits.”

Hana looked at her — really looked — and finally, her walls cracked just a little more.

“I’m scared, Dr. Ziegler.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I’m scared that it’s already too late. And I don’t even know if I’m doing the right thing anymore.”

Angela nodded, voice soft and resolute.

“That’s why we’re going to figure it out together.”

Angela let Hana take her time.

She didn’t push. Didn’t prompt again.

Just waited.

And maybe it was that — the patience — that finally helped Hana find the strength to speak.

She wiped her face with her sleeve, cleared her throat, and adjusted the tablet’s angle so Angela could see her more clearly. The glow of the screen cast her in harsh light. Her eyes looked haunted.

“Okay,” Hana breathed. “I'll start from the beginning.”

She hesitated.

Then she began — voice quiet, controlled at first, but gaining momentum like something uncorked.

“The first thing that stood out was the blackout. The logs from the day of the Gwishin attack were clean. Too clean. Like they’d been scrubbed. No data streams, no comm transcripts, nothing from the other pilots. Nothing from me. Even the damage reports to my mech didn’t add up. We knew there was something missing, and I needed to know why.”

Angela listened, nodding once — encouraging her to continue.

“Sombra was already in Korea. I think she was drawn to the same red flags. I caught her intercepting a training stream one night — and I thought she’d run, but she didn’t. I think she wanted to be caught. Maybe she was testing me.”

“We made a deal. I’d let her move freely, and she’d help me access MEKA archives without alerting their internal security systems. She got through every layer like it was nothing. We uncovered sealed files. Experimental tech. Unapproved research projects tied to international contractors. And one of the logos we found—”

Her voice hitched.

“It was Talon’s.”

Angela’s eyes narrowed slightly, her tone calm but firm.

“You’re certain?”

Hana nodded slowly.

“I’d never forget it. I saw it on my HUD during the attack too, I think. Just for a second. Back then I thought I was imagining things. But… it’s the same one. I know it is.”

Angela leaned back slightly, folding her hands beneath her chin. She didn’t interrupt.

“We were in deeper than I realized. I think Sombra knew we were getting too close. She tried to end it — told me I should go back to base. That it wasn’t safe anymore. I thought she was just brushing me off. But she was scared, Angela. I didn’t see it then, but… she was scared.”

Another beat of silence passed.

Then she spoke again, her voice cracking.

“A month later, she was gone. No sign of her anywhere. And then I got the video. You saw what was in it.”

Angela nodded gravely.

“I did.”

“I think Talon found out. Or maybe MEKA did. But someone hurt her. And now I’m stuck between both — between my job, and whatever I became to her. And I can’t stop thinking—”

She stopped herself.

Angela waited. Her voice, when it came, was gentle.

“Thinking what?”

Hana looked down at her lap, ashamed.

“…That she didn’t deserve what happened to her. That maybe she was trying to change.”

Angela didn’t answer right away. Her expression softened — not with pity, but with something more complicated. Sympathy, perhaps. Or understanding born from her own failures.

“It’s not foolish to care about someone who hurt you,” she said. “It’s brave. But it is dangerous. And I need to ask this next question carefully, Hana.”

Hana nodded once.

Angela’s gaze sharpened just slightly.

“Is there anything you found that MEKA — or Talon — would kill to keep secret?”

Hana hesitated.

“I don’t know.”

“But Sombra thought there was.”

A long silence followed. Angela finally exhaled.

“Then we need to secure everything you have. I’ll loop in someone I trust to help verify the data.”

Hana looked up quickly.

“You believe me?”

Angela nodded. “I believe you believe her. And that’s enough to start with.”

Hana shifted forward on the crate, the tablet still propped up in front of her as the call continued. Angela’s image flickered slightly in the dim maintenance corridor light.

“If you’re going to loop in Overwatch contacts,” Hana said cautiously, “can you tell me who? I want to help — I can vouch for what we found. Maybe if I talk to them, explain—”

Angela held up a hand.

“No.”

Her tone wasn’t harsh. It was soft — but immovable.

Hana blinked, caught off guard.

“I… what?”

Angela’s eyes met hers through the screen. She didn’t look angry. If anything, she looked more concerned than ever.

“Hana. Listen to me. You’ve done more than enough tonight.”

“But—”

“No.” Angela’s voice was firmer now. Decided. “You are exhausted. Your hands are shaking. Your eyes are glassy. I know what burnout looks like, and you are past the line. You’re on the other side of it.”

Hana looked down, suddenly feeling the full weight of her body. Her shoulders slumped without realizing it. Her legs ached. Her chest felt too tight.

“I’ll get in touch with people I trust,” Angela continued. “And I will call you in the morning when I’ve secured our next steps. But right now, what I need most from you — the only thing — is sleep.”

She smiled, but it was a knowing smile. “I’ll even write you a prescription for eight hours if I have to.”

That got the faintest huff of a laugh from Hana. It surprised her.

She rubbed her eyes. Didn’t fight it.

Didn’t have the strength to.

“…Okay,” she murmured. “But if I get anything else from her—”

“Send it to me immediately.” Angela nodded. “No delay. I’ll be monitoring everything you gave me tonight. If there’s a pattern or a clue, I’ll find it.”

Hana finally nodded. Her lips parted as if to say something more — maybe thank you — but no words came.

Angela simply smiled again, more gently this time.

“Sleep, Hana. I’ve got you now.”

The screen blinked out.

Dark.

Silence.

For the first time in weeks… Hana felt like she might not be entirely alone.

Her muscles protested as she stood — legs stiff, back sore. The emotional weight had settled deep into her bones. Everything about her felt used up.

She didn’t even bother sneaking back through the more private maintenance corridors. She walked the long way, through the base's quieter late-night halls. It was nearly dawn again anyway. Only a few technicians moved about, too groggy or preoccupied to notice her.

The harsh overhead lights buzzed faintly as she passed. Her boots felt heavier than usual. One foot in front of the other — barely thinking about the steps anymore.

When she reached her quarters, the familiar security pad blinked blue.

She stared at it a second longer than she meant to before finally pressing her palm against the scanner.

Welcome back, Lt. Song.

The door slid open with a soft hiss.

Her room was still. Tidy. Too tidy — as if it belonged to someone else. The trophies and posters sat where she left them. Her bed was untouched, sheets folded back from her last failed attempt to sleep.

She toed off her boots one at a time. Peeled off her jacket. Didn’t bother changing out of the rest of her clothes.

Just walked numbly toward the bed, pulled the blanket around herself, and collapsed onto the mattress.

The moment she closed her eyes, the static behind her eyelids flared — images of Sombra’s bruised face, the flicker in her mechanical eyes, the text on the screen. Backstabbers.

But they didn’t hold her hostage this time.

Because for the first time in a month, Hana felt like she had a lifeline. Thin and fragile, maybe — but real. Angela believed her. Help was coming.

And maybe, just maybe… she hadn’t failed yet.

The room remained quiet, the early morning light creeping through the blinds in faint lines across the floor.

Hana’s breath slowed.

For the first time in days…

She slept.