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Baptiste had long since accepted that he didn’t have a soul bond. There had been times when he had dared to hope, when infatuation had disguised itself as the promise as something more – it was why he had stayed so long with Mauga, why he had remained in orbit, even when it was clear they were on a collision course that no one would survive. There had been moments when he thought he’d felt a flicker of something else, fear, pain, the heightened emotions that could stretch the distance, but when he chased them there was nothing. It wasn’t as though he was alone, the number of soul-bonded people had dwindled until it was almost as much a miracle as peace.
Some blamed the Omnics, believing the Iris had drawn the light of soul-bonds into itself when it formed, stealing that almost mystical bond to make something more. Baptise had a feeling it had more to do with the darkening turn of the world. It was hard enough to find allies these days as people turned on one another, to be able to find that one person that mirrored your soul in that miasma, well…you’d need to be a lot luckier than a man like him.
So, when he stumbled mid-battle as a voice that wasn’t his own rang in his ears, he almost thought nothing of it, the world around him filled with panicked shouts, barked orders and the sharp retort of gunfire interrupted by muffled explosions.
Go! I’ll be right behind you!
Still, he turned for a half a second to glance behind him, but there was no one there, just a ruined wall and a sense that he was missing something or someone. The ground near his foot exploded as bullets tore through rock and mud, and he flung himself to the side, cursing himself for getting distracted in the middle of a battle. Shaking his head to banish the feeling, he rushed forward, ducking between cover and returning fire, only to stumble as suddenly it felt as though the ground had given way beneath him.
He was falling. The world disappearing beneath his feet, sky and death beneath him, the ground a looming, growing threat.
Baptiste stumbled and distantly he was aware of hitting the ground with his knees, but the feeling of freefall was consuming him. Then there was cold. Something biting into the flesh of his arm, and his weapon clattered to the ground as he grabbed the arm. There was nothing there, and yet something was biting into his skin.
Relief. Hope. Terror. None of them his flooded him, so fast and strong, that he vomited there and then on the ground.
Bile rose, as that cold burn on his arm vanished and he was falling again. And now it felt like his vision was fracturing into two.
Twin visions of sky and ground.
Green falling.
Green chasing.
Save me!
Save him!
Baptiste felt them collide, felt a surge of power, vision turning green as something roared in his ears. And then he was falling with them, pitching forward as they hit something hard with the force to drive all the air out of his lungs.
Hands gripping one another, slicked with blood… reaching for him.
A voice pained...desperate… bright green eyes that weren’t eyes locked on him, as though they could see him over whatever distance separated them.
“We need you…”
Baptiste tried to reply, but he was splintered, pulled in different directions. The sound of his own battle disappearing in the roar filling his ears, and as he felt himself falling with them, he made a promise, to himself as much as them.
I will find you.
**
It was a promise that was easier made than kept.
When he’d come to, surrounded by the ongoing chaos of his own situation, all thought of the fight he was committed to was gone from his mind. All he’d known was that he needed to get up and get out, that he needed to be somewhere other than this.
Yet, when he found shelter in a half-standing, bullet-riddled home and reached out, chasing that feeling, that promise, all he’d found was darkness. As though whatever link had formed in that moment, had been severed, and remembering the pain and fear that hadn’t been his, until they had become one with his own emotions, he wondered if he was too late. As if in that moment when he’d found…him? Them? It had already been too late.
Surely the world couldn’t be that cruel.
He’d burrowed in. Closing himself off from the battle around him, hiding from everything all to chase that thread of possibility.
Please. Please don’t let me be too late.
Was this punishment for losing hope? For believing that he would never have a soul-bond? To have it dangled in front of him, and to be powerless to find them.
Them.
There had been two, he was sure of it. Two flavours of fear, two shades of green, two voices stretching for him over a vast distance. Was that even possible? He hadn’t heard of it, but then so much had been lost and so much had changed, and if he was honest, he had stopped listening to the stories. Stories carried a hope that could worm its way through the strongest armour, and so he had hidden from them. Now, he cursed himself for not listening, for not knowing.
How do I find you?
Who are you?
Are you okay?
There was no reply, no flicker of awareness.
And Baptiste had never felt so alone.
****
It was several days before felt anything to suggest that they were still alive, by which time he was but a shadow of himself. Hiding from the world, from the duty he had assigned himself. A living ghost, waiting for permission to still be alive. He ate and drank enough to survive, prayed to gods he had never believed in and waited.
Please…
Green flickered in the back of his mind, and the edge of his vision. Dulled. Not by distance, although he could still tell they were far from him, but by the weight of something worse. Loss? No…. when he focused, he could feel desperation that wasn’t his, and the familiar, low flicker of hope that couldn’t be allowed to die.
We need you. He needs you.
The He brought with a swell of emotion, of love and need, of hope fading at the edges. He got the impression of song, a beat that seemed to vibrate through both of them, although Baptiste had the feeling it came from the other one. The third. The one that he realised he could still feel, a warm patch in the darkness of that connection. Even more distant than whoever was reaching out to him, and yet close, as though some part of them had latched onto Baptiste in that terrible moment of falling.
Where are you? He sent back desperately, pouring everything into those words. The need. The want. The fear that this dream might be snatched away.
Waiting.
There was a wealth of meaning that he couldn’t untangle, the unhelpful answer raising his hackles and bringing him to life, ready to demand a proper answer. To shout and scream that he had waited long enough.
You’ll know…
The connection flickered and faded, leaving Baptiste more confused and frustrated than ever. If he knew, then he wouldn’t be asking, and he couldn’t see how that was going to change. And yet, there had been such certainty in those last two words, such trust, that he swallowed the anger and staggered to his feet at last. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do or where he was going to go, just that he couldn’t stay here and wait, not now he knew they were still out there.
That they were waiting for him.
*
The world outside his hiding place was too bright, death pressed across its landscape, but for once the weight of it didn’t crush him. He had another battle to fight. He had people who needed him. He had…
“You must be Baptiste…”
Green flared in the back of his mind, as red and brown filled his vision, and Baptiste blinked as he stared at the cowboy standing in front of him.
You’ll know.
****
Overwatch.
A new fight for the future. Baptiste had listened to the sale pitch, had heard the sincerity and belief in the cowboy’s – in Cole’s words. There was a time it would have ignited a flame in him, and he knew that it would in the future, but all he had been able to focus on was that flare of green, and the echo of those words, and his agreement had been rushed and had sounded a lot more like ‘I’ll find you’ than he cared to admit. If Cassidy wondered at his odd, distracted agreement, or the fact that Baptiste had spent the entire journey to Watchpoint Gibraltar acting like a man sat on an anthill, he had been kind enough not to mention it and the three women they had travelled with had followed his lead, although Baptiste had felt the stares and burn of curiosity.
He didn’t care.
Because the closer they got to their destination, the brighter the green grew until it felt like the entire world had been encased in an emerald. The only thing containing his hope and expectation, was that whenever he reached out there was only silence, and that eerie feeling of waiting for something to break, a breath he wasn’t holding, but couldn’t be released.
He was the first off, the dropship, scanning the small group who had come to greet them. None of them blazed green in his eyes or his mind, but they were here, he could feel it.
“Where are they?” It was almost a shout, the words bursting out of him as he scanned across unfamiliar faces and reached for where he could feel them in the back of his mind. One still distant, the other on edge, like a sword waiting to strike. A blonde-haired woman stepped forward, and his attention snapped to her.
“They’re waiting for you,” she was smiling at him, but there was something in her expression. A shadow. One he had seen countless times, the ghost of bad news waiting to happen.
“They didn’t come to greet me…” He couldn’t hide the disappointment. He’d known, some part of him had known that the intermittent connection, the shadowed green of the second in the back of his mind, that this wasn’t going to be the joyous meeting he dreamt of. Reality was always worse than speculation though, and thee was a lead weight in his stomach as her smile faded.
“You’ll see why,” she murmured. “I promise, there is a good reason for making you wait.”
“Doc…” Cole said, stepping forward and Baptiste stiffened. Doc.
“Not now Cole,” she cut across him, the familiarity between them enough to settle Baptiste a little. “He’s needed.”
*
Doc… Angela as she’d introduced herself as she’d led him away, seemed to realise he was a man on the edge as she hadn’t filled the quiet with needless chatter as she’d led him deeper into the base. He was distantly aware that Fareeha was following, of a humming energy between the two of them. He suspected that they had the bond he longed for, but he didn’t ask, couldn’t ask and they seemed to realise that, keeping apart for the time being and he knew that later he would need to thank them.
“…Baptiste…” He jolted, realising with a start they had come to a halt in front of a pair of double doors. And his heart did a complicated twist as he recognised the room that lay beyond.
“They….” He wasn’t sure what he wanted to ask and fell silent. He could feel them both now, bright green and shadow green, so close that it was humming in his veins.
“They were on a mission that went wrong,” Angela filled the silence finally, turning to look at him, commanding his attention. “Genji is healing well, although he will be out of action a little longer. Lúcio…”
Genji. Lúcio.
He grasped the names, pulled them into himself. Felt the greens sorting themselves, bright and dull. Present and fading. Felt the words that Angela wasn’t able to say.
“Thank you.” For the names, for looking after them, for guiding me here…. He didn’t have the words for all of that, didn’t have any other words apart from the two names that were now as much a part of him as his own name, and Angela nodded and opened the door, waving him through.
Later he would press her for more information.
For now, he needed them.
*
Inside the medical bay it wasn’t hard to find the occupied bed. He would have been able to find it in the dark, because what had been faint and distant before was now a roaring current in the back of his mind. Green-fire wrapped around hope and fear and doubt and fear. Dull green stretching, searching, looking for an anchor in the darkness around it.
“I’m here.” His voice was far too loud in the quiet of the medical bay, seeming to even silence the beeping for a moment as his feet carried him to where the world pulsed green, and light spilled between closed curtains. A lifeline. A warning so as not to startle them. He hesitated for a second at the edge of the curtained off area, knowing that the next step would change everything about him, and them, and stepped forward anyway.
The world spun green and then settled. First on the man sat in the chair next to the bed, eyes raking over advanced cybernetics and cyborg parts, taking in damage to exposed skin and metal with equal worry. There was a helmet discarded on the floor, and the man that looked back at him was heavily scarred, eyes red-rimmed and weary, and full of desperate hope as their eyes met.
Genji.
He needs you. The words echoed, in the back of his mind and in the air between them, in a voice that Baptiste immediately felt as though he had known all his life; and his gaze turned to the bed.
The emotions that surged through him were not just his own. His shock and fear, bleeding with dulled shock and a deeper weary terror, one that had been fought for days.
Lúcio.
Lúcio looked impossibly small in the bed, swathed in bandages. Baptiste didn’t need to look at the machines or the chart, or ask Angela, he could feel the pain now, the bond snapping into place between them, and almost staggered under the force of it.
Did stagger as he moved forward. Closing the distance between them at last.
“I found you,” he didn’t recognise his own voice, changed already by the twin souls now connected to him. He moved to Genji’s side, reached out with a trembling hand, letting it fall on the junction between metal and flesh on his shoulder. Felt the bond burst bright green, hope and more flooding him, swelling until he was dizzy with it. His other hand stretched out, finding the limp one on the bed already cradled in Genji’s hand, his fingers curling around both of them. “I’m here with you.”
Words for both of them.
And there in the bond, he felt that other green unfurling, brightening with a song that filled the air.
And between their joined hands, Lúcio’s fingers twitched.