Work Text:
The first time Wuyang wakes, it's with his arm slung over Hana’s shoulders, iron and ash thick in his mouth. His lower midsection burns something fierce, and he gets the distinct impression he shouldn't look.
“That was so stupid,” Hana is saying. There's blood caked in her hair, and with his vision fading in and out of focus, she looks a little bit like Anran. “If you die, I’m making Mercy bring you back so I can kill you myself.”
She turns and yells something into her comm, and Wuyang can almost hear Sojourn’s calm, reassuring timbre filter through in response. Like this, she almost sounds like his mother. If he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend that the fire and noise around him is the Fire College wuguan, and the pain down his lower half is from overexertion and not because he’s dying.
As the darkness starts to close in on the edges of his vision, he can feel Hana lean his head against her shoulder. She is smaller, and thinner, but she and Anran use the same perfume. He wonders if he’s ever told her that. She’s looking at him with wide eyes, baffled and a little afraid, and he fears he’s said that much out loud.
The smoke across the battlefield clears, and he can see the ORCA. Sojourn and Mercy are waiting for them there, Bastion posted like a sentry nearby. Mercy spots them first, and her eyes widen, something graven passing over her face. Hana adjusts his arm over her shoulder, and he keens in pain. Dots dance across his vision like sparks.
“Gonna pass out,” he manages. There’s something hot and coppery in the back of his throat, at the base of his tongue.
“Don’t you dare,” she says; Hana, or maybe Anran, chasing him into unconsciousness.
The second time he wakes, he's pretty sure he's in the ORCA. Thin, deft fingers card through his hair.
He goes to sit up, but the space beneath his ribs feels like it’s on fire, and a cry rips out of his throat. Those same fingers move to push him back down gently, and elsewhere in the ORCA there’s a cacophony of alarmed voices.
“It's okay,” someone says, young and feminine and not his sister but close enough. Bent over him like a protective shadow, smoothing a cold palm over his forehead. “Don't move. You're okay. You're okay.”
His sister is stubborn and unruly and irritating, and he will always, always trust her. He closes his eyes again and slumps back into her lap and lets sleep take him again.
The third time Wuyang wakes up, it's to the cold, clinical glare of the medbay lights. He feels weightless and numb in a way that must be the work of really good painkillers.
Hana is on her phone at his bedside, gauze taped at her temple where the blood had been a slow trickle down the side of her face. There’s a furrow in her brow, a terseness that belies the depth of her concern. He opens his mouth to make fun of her for getting wrinkles in her twenties. What comes out instead is a dry-mouthed rasp and a pained grimace.
“Ugh,” he says eloquently.
Hana looks up, expression smoothing and brightening in an instant as she stands from the stool she’d been hunched over. “Good morning, sleeping beauty.” She slides her phone into the pocket of some MEKA-branded jacket she’s thrown over her usual flight suit. “How are you feeling?”
“Um,” he says. He feels, distinctly, like he’s been cast out onto a lake of very thin ice. He takes a quick stock of himself— he’s not in nauseating amounts of pain anymore, and he’s alive, which are, objectively, improvements from before. “Better?”
Her smile sharpens viciously. “Great!” she chirps, and then she hits him hard over the head. “What the hell were you thinking?!”
It’s a bizarre thing to ask, because from what he can remember about that moment. He hadn’t been thinking about much of anything. Only that he’d seen the danger, and she hadn’t, but he has a feeling that saying any of that will only make her angrier. “I was just trying to keep you safe,” is what he settles on, defensive and a little tetchy. “You're like… a celebrity. And my friend.”
Her jaw tightens, and something flinty and dark sparks across her eyes. The anger that chases a close call. “I'm in a mech.”
“I saw it first. It would’ve been you.”
She holds the anger for only a moment before deflating entirely, bowing over his bedside. Her bangs hide her eyes from view, but he can see the twist of her mouth. “You're too young to die,” she says, sounding small. He’s never heard her like that. It feels wrong, like he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t. Maybe that’s the point, or the problem. This war is everyone’s war now, but that doesn’t make it any easier for her, he imagines, to watch history repeat itself.
“You only have two years on me, 姐姐,” he says very softly. “I knew the risks when I signed up.”
One of her hands is fisted in the crisp white sheets. He can feel the way it shakes. “You’re a good person, Wuyang,” Hana says to the far wall. “All that tends to get you is killed.”
Wuyang lets himself think about that for a minute, all that Water College patience they tried to instill in him. How long has she been fighting the same war? Watching friends become funerals, unable to mourn because every part of her life is advertised. And then came Overwatch, but it was only to watch them take in Illari, then Juno, then him. She tries so hard to keep them safe. Keep them sane. Has anyone thanked her for trying? Should he? Hadn’t Anran done that, too?
He musters up a smile, something cocksure and reassuring, trading looks with his sister over a different battlefield, miles away. “Maybe I’m just trying to be like you,” he says.
She barks out a laugh, sharp and startled as she reaches up to discreetly swipe at her eyes. Plausible deniability. “God, don’t do that. You’ll make me feel old.” She looks pleased though. So he’d guessed right, after all.
He reaches out to take her hand. They’re always so cold— bad circulation, she’d said. “I wasn’t gonna die,” he says, keeping his voice gentle. “Not when I have debts to pay.”
She squeezes his hand tightly, but the tension in her shoulders ebbs, if just a little. Her eyes still look a little wet. “You saved my life,” she says. “I think that more than pays off whatever you think you owe.”
“Yeah, but I kind of also got your mech blown up,” he points out. Always desperate to be a martyr, even in jest. “However that math works out, I think I'm still indebted to you.”
She rolls her eyes. “Careful. I might start to think that you’re coming up with excuses to be at my beck and call.”
“What can I say? Maybe I like it when you boss me around.” He grins, a little crooked, a little strained. “Or maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment. Speaking of debts, though— you aren't free of them, either.”
“Yeah?” An air of caution, of curiosity. He wants her to bite the bait, but she doesn’t want to give him that satisfaction. Unfortunately, her attempt at aloofness doesn’t seem to do much, because his smile only widens.
“I’m waiting, you know. You still owe me Mecha Guardian lessons.”
The memory clicks in an instant. She presses her knuckles against her lips in a vain effort to smother her smile. “Really? That’s what you want to cash this in for?”
“I’m hardstuck,” he whines. “Just make a smurf. No one will know.”
She puffs out her chest. “D.Va does not smurf.”
“Yeah, but, like, maybe Hana Song does?” he says, but his voice cracks over the syllables of her name, and it sounds less like wheedling and more honest than he’d intended. Hana stares at the side of his face, and he knows he’s been caught. He’s shown too much of his hand to her. The homesickness that he works so hard to hide.
She’s still holding his hand. She lifts it a little to play with his fingers, the movements utterly mindless. Distraction. “My name, Hana, means one, did you know that?” she says. “I always thought it was a play on player one or something. My parents died before I ever found out.” She goes quiet again, watching him, then looking away. Her throat bobs. “I never had siblings. I always wanted one, though. Guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
Oh, he thinks. The thought sits there, caught in his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He’s never been good at comforting people, and there is a nonzero chance that the painkillers are responsible for whatever happens next. “You, uh, you can share my sister if you want? She’s— she’s really overbearing, and really strong, and really cool, and, y’know, she kind of reminds me of you, and— uh, I’m gonna stop talking.”
His cheeks are hot by the time he’s done rambling.
Hana blinks several times, then smirks, long and slow. “If we’re sharing families, that means you have to share my mom.”
Wuyang blinks, not really sure where to take that, because she just said her parents are dead. “Um,” he says eloquently. “Who?”
The medbay door slides open. Hana turns from the bed to face it. “Hey, I got another one for you. He’s even more self-sacrificial than me!”
“Impressive, given your record,” Dr. Ziegler says without missing a beat, not looking up from the datapad in her hand as she steps inside. “Hello, Wuyang.”
“Hi, Dr. Ziegler,” he manages weakly, remembering the frantic look in her eye from across the battlefield before he’d passed out. Angela Ziegler, who was, apparently, Hana’s pseudo-mom? And his? However that worked. “Uh. I wouldn’t— I wouldn’t call it self-sacrifice. I was being heroic!”
Dr. Ziegler shoots him an exasperatedly seasoned look. Hana laughs into her hand.
He likes Dr. Ziegler— he’s asked her for help with some of his classwork before, and she’s very nice and super smart, but also really, really intimidating when she wants to be. Besides, Hana is comfortable and familiar around her in a way Wuyang has only seen otherwise from, like, Cassidy or Sojourn. That has to be a good sign, right?
“I’ll, uh, try to keep the heroics to a minimum, though,” he adds belatedly. “You know, for the future.”
Dr. Ziegler smiles. “Good answer.”
Hana leans over him to take a picture of them both. Wuyang tips his head against hers and throws up a quick peace sign.
“Juno was asking if you're okay,” she explains, pulling away and thumbing the photo into the group chat with the three of them plus Illari. Illari never responds to anything they send or tag her in, but Hana is confident they’ll get her at some point.
“I feel great,” he says, shooting her two thumbs up so she can take another photo. “Which is probably just the painkillers.”
“It is,” Dr. Ziegler says mildly from her desk.
“Nice,” he says, dropping his hands as he turns back to Hana. “Hey, can you send me that one? I need to text my sister so she knows I’m okay. We were on the news, right?”
“Yup,” Hana says, popping the ‘p’ as she continues to putter on her phone. “Lucky for you, some world-renowned hero known as D.Va escorted you to safety, and Overwatch went home victorious once again. I think you’re in the clear.”
“How generous of her,” he drawls, moving his foot off the bed to poke her leg with his toe. “Send the photo anyway? If she saw me take the hit, she’ll know.”
“Fine, fine,” she says, and his phone blips a moment later. “You’re so bossy on painkillers.”
He grins, craning his neck to look down at his phone and shoot the photo off to Anran with a short, quippy caption. “Just giving you a taste of your own medicine.”
Hana rolls her eyes, spinning on her heel to face Dr. Ziegler. “Ha ha. Are you seeing this, Angie? Can you believe this? This is what I have to deal with.”
Dr. Ziegler glances up over the rims of her reading glasses with a half-smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. “You were here last week. I fail to see how you have any leverage in this argument.”
Hana mimes being stabbed, staggering back against the bed. “Betrayal? From my own corner?”
Dr. Ziegler makes an ambivalent noise of disinterest, turning back to her work. “Yes, I’m very evil.”
Hana squawks in protest, and Wuyang watches her and he can envision her and Anran in the same room. Hana as the insufferable middle child. Both of them pushing against his hair, having fun at his behest. Someone like Hana shouldn’t be without family, he thinks.
His phone chimes— a very long string of what looks like very angry characters from Anran. The painkillers must be kicking in again, because his vision is too blurry to make much out beyond you idiot and i love you and come home soon. He glances up to Hana and finds her looking at him already, that worried wrinkle between her brows firmly in place once more.
“I’ll be okay,” he says, the words coming slowly as he leans back against the cotton pillows.
“You better be,” she says, reaching out to poke his forehead. He can’t feel it very well, but the spot tingles like TV static. “I always pay my debts.”
Wuyang thinks she says something else, but it’s all muffled, faraway, sensations slipping into the black. He thinks he feels her fingers brush his hair out of his eyes, but by then, he’s already asleep.