Work Text:
Heng sat hunched at her desk, her head cradled in her hands, while her phone buzzed against the wood for what felt like the hundredth time. The vibration skittered across the surface in short, insistent bursts, rattling through the quiet of her room. She didn’t need to check the screen to know who it was. It was Yi. It was always Yi when news like this broke.
Usually, she would have answered before the first ring had fully sounded, a smile already tugging at her lips as she swiped to accept. She liked hearing his voice fill the space around her, liked the way hours slipped by unnoticed when they talked. But today she let it ring. She let it buzz and tremble and go still. She couldn’t bring herself to pick up.
She already knew why he was calling.
Highguard was shutting down.
He had done the same thing when Concord folded, calling her within minutes of the announcement, his timing almost surgical. Both times, she had been the one brimming with excitement at launch, sending him trailers and patch notes, practically begging him to download the game and queue with her. She’d stayed up past midnight on release days, texting him live reactions, convinced that this one, this one, would be different.
‘It won’t last.’ he’d always said. ‘It’s just more hero shooter slop.’
He repeated it like a mantra, unmoved by her enthusiasm. No matter how passionately she argued, how many late-night messages she fired off about new character reveals or clever mechanics, she had never managed to change his mind. And when the servers eventually went dark, when his prediction came true, he never wasted a second reminding her.
The phone stopped buzzing.
For a moment there was silence, thick and fragile, the kind that felt as if it might shatter with the smallest movement. Heng kept her eyes fixed on the shutdown notice glowing on her monitor, hoping irrationally that the words would rearrange themselves if she blinked enough times.
Servers closing in three days. Thank you for your support.
The phrasing was so clean, so bloodless. As if the game had been a minor inconvenience instead of the thing she’d rushed home for, the thing that had filled her weekends and her group chats and the empty spaces in her evenings.
Maybe he’d given up, she thought.
Then the phone started buzzing again, louder this time in the quiet room, vibrating hard enough to scrape against the desk.
Heng squeezed her eyes shut and let it ring twice more, her jaw tightening with each pulse. Ignoring it hadn’t helped. The silence between calls only made the next one worse. With a sharp breath, she reached out, grabbed the phone, and swiped to answer before she could change her mind.
“What.” she said flatly.
There was a brief pause on the other end, not triumphant, not smug. Just cautious.
“So.” Yi said slowly, “I’m guessing you saw it.”
His voice was measured, almost careful, and that unsettled her more than any teasing would have. She glanced back at her monitor as if she needed to confirm the notice was still there. It was sitting in the center of the screen like a verdict.
“Yeah.” she replied. “I saw.”
Another pause stretched between them. She could almost picture him leaning back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his face while he searched for the right words.
“I wasn’t calling to gloat.” he said at last.
She let out a humorless huff. “Yes, you were.”
“Not this time,” he admitted, a faint, self aware note slipping into his voice. “It’s not as satisfying the second time. I just… wanted to check on you.”
That took some of the heat out of her anger.
She turned back to the game’s main menu. Her character stood idle in gleaming armor, cape shifting in a wind that didn’t exist. She remembered launch night, the countdown ticking away while global chat exploded with emotes, the first chaotic matches where no one knew what they were doing, the rush of discovering some tiny piece of tech before anyone else posted about it. She’d called Yi that night too, talking over the login music, breathless and certain.
‘It’s going to die in a few weeks.’ he’d told her then. ‘It’s more of the same, but worse.’
The words echoed now, sharp and unwanted.
“You sounded more excited about this one.” Yi said quietly, pulling her back to the present.
Her throat tightened. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
She struggled to articulate it. It wasn’t just about being right or wrong. It was about the way he always stood at a distance from the things she loved, arms metaphorically crossed, waiting for them to collapse. It was about how she dove in anyway, into games, into shows, into fleeting obsessions with both hands, even knowing they might not last. Especially knowing that.
“I just don’t get why you have to keep score.” she said instead. “Why does it matter so much to you that I’m wrong?”
“It doesn’t.” he said quickly. Then he sighed. “I just call things as I see them. I’m not trying to make you feel bad when I turn out to be right.”
“It feels like you are.”
On the other end, she could hear the faint hum of his computer fan and the creak of his chair, familiar background sounds from a hundred late night conversations that had nothing to do with shutdown notices. When he spoke again, his voice was softer.
“I don’t think it’s dumb that you get excited.” he said. “I just… assume the worst. It’s easier that way.”
She didn’t respond, caught off guard.
“When you get into something.” he continued, “you really get into it. It’s one of my favorite things about you. You get excited enough for both of us. Yes, sometimes it crashes and burns. But you had fun while it lasted. I kind of just stand there waiting for the crash so I can say I saw it coming.”
Heng turned back to the screen. Three days. After that, the login button would be useless, the servers powered down in some building she would never see. All the skins, the voice lines, the clutch wins and humiliating losses gone except for whatever clips people bothered to save.
“I don’t know why I bother.” she murmured. “They all die eventually.”
“Everything does.” Yi said. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy it while it’s here.”
She blinked, startled to hear her own usual argument reflected back at her.
“How long do the servers have left?” he asked.
“Three days.”
She heard typing on his end, quick and decisive.
“Okay,” he said.
She frowned. “Okay what?”
“For you to show me why you liked it so much. I’m downloading it.”
She straightened in her chair. “You’re serious.”
“If it’s going down anyway, I might as well see what I missed. Worst case, I hate it and you get to laugh at me struggling.”
Despite herself, she felt a smile tug at her lips. “You will struggle.”
“Debatable.”
“The queue times are awful,” she warned. “And the balance is a mess.”
“I expected as much.”
She rolled her eyes, but the tight ache in her chest had softened into something warmer. The shutdown notice still glowed on her screen, sterile and final, but beneath it the Play button waited, unchanged.
“For the record,” Yi added, his voice quieter now, “I’ll try to be more considerate going forward.”
She smiled, knowing he meant it. “You will?”
“Of course.”
The simple certainty in his tone eased something knotted deep inside her.
“I believe you,” she said, clicking back into the game as the music swelled through her speakers. “Hurry up and finish downloading. I’m not carrying you.”
He laughed in that composed, familiar way she loved, the sound filling the quiet room in a way the buzzing never could. “Don’t get cocky, Heng.”
In the corner of her screen, the countdown kept ticking, three days, twenty-three hours, fifty-eight minutes, its steady rhythm no longer a warning siren but something softer, almost steadying. The numbers were still slipping away, second by second, but they didn’t feel like they were stealing something from her anymore. They felt like a promise: this is how long you have. Use it.
Three days to stay up too late. Three days to argue about team comps and blame each other for missed skill shots. Three days to drag Yi across maps he’d once dismissed without ever seeing, to watch him slowly, reluctantly admit that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t as bad as he’d claimed.
The end was still coming. The servers would power down, the login screen would go dark, and Highguard would join the quiet graveyard of games that had burned bright and brief.
But endings felt different when someone chose to stand beside you for them.
The game was dying.
Yet somehow, with his download bar crawling forward and his voice warm in her ear, it didn’t feel like losing.
It felt like staying until the very last second together.