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Emre wakes to a start, jolting upright as he feels the spasms throughout his body, his heart hammering. It takes him a while to catch up with his breath. He remembers –
Freja looking at him, the light in her evergreen eyes fading as she reaches out to cup his face. His hands are all over her body, not knowing where to staunch the bleeding from her wounds – her skin rent from too many places, damaged beyond repair by his own hand.
God, he had caused this. He had gone too far. He had hurt her. And now–
“It’s alright, Emre,” Freja lies through copper-stained lips. “It wasn’t you.”
Even dying, it’s her doing the reassuring. He doesn’t even hear the words coming out of his own mouth: denials, apologies, everything he had ever meant to tell her. Why hadn’t he told her sooner?
“Frej, stay with me, please,” he cries into her wrist, desperate for her pulse. “Please, please don’t leave me, I–”
“I know.” She smiles beatifically for the last time, an undeserved grace, a light squeeze from her hand on his cheek that her remaining strength allows. And then –
He cries out her name, clutching at his chest, the pain so visceral it feels like his heart is being carved out. He had hurt her in the haze of his monstrous state and had come back to his senses with her bleeding out in his arms. She’s gone. The guilt bears down on him now, like a tidal wave swallowing him in its pull. He can’t breathe. He feels like he’s asphyxiating, gasping just to force his lungs to contract long enough to hold air, but it’s all too heavy.
And then –
A door across him opens.
“Emre?”
It’s Freja’s voice he hears calling his name. Always with that gentleness she reserved only for him – even as she was dying. Especially then. He hears her call for him again, and fighting to open his eyes, he sees the bleary shadow of her figure.
He’s hallucinating.
The Freja in front of him – is alive.
“Emre,” she says again, voice steady and soothing through the storm of his mind. “You must have been having a bad dream. You’re awake now. It’s alright.”
“Frej,” he rasps, a hand over his heart that hasn’t stopped straining. “You–”
“Breathe, Emre.” He feels her hand move to cover his. “Listen to my breathing. Follow it. Breathe with me.”
Ever the soldier, he follows her instructions, echoing the pace she’s set with long inhalations and slow exhalations. As he comes down from his heightened state, it’s then that his vision clears and he’s able to notice the more minute details of the scene before him.
He’s at his parent’s home in Istanbul, sitting on the unmistakable ochre couch his mother had always refused to get rid of. Everything is in its familiar place – the frames, the plants, the various heirlooms. Freja is also there next to him wearing one of his old military training shirts.
She looks impossibly young.
He had forgotten how soft and precious she had been before – before he left Overwatch, before the world turned her away, before she started to willingly scar herself for the right payers.
Before she had paid the ultimate price from trying to save him.
“How–” He’s stumbling over his words as he tries to make sense of what he’s seeing, reconciling what he knows is true and this cruel trick of a false memory. “Freja, how are you here?”
“We arrived together last night. Your parents picked us up from the airport,” she says with a concerned frown. “You don’t remember?”
He vaguely remembers this day, one of the few pieces of his memory that he had been able to retain, one of the happier times that had been able to anchor him through the nightmare of his mind no longer being completely his own. He remembers that he had brought her to his hometown, but that had been years and years ago, almost as though a different life entirely.
“My parents…?”
“Are still out. They said they would go get some of your favorites at a bakery for when you woke up,” she explains. “I’m glad they’re not here to see you like this, if I’m this worried for you.” She moves the hand that had been over his chest and presses it to his forehead. “No fever. It really must have been just a nightmare.”
His hand shoots out to catch hers before she can replace it to her side, afraid that if she’ll disappear along with the loss of contact. It’s then that he also notices his own hand being composed of all flesh – no wires, no ports, no cybernetic implants.
He had forgotten how his own skin had looked like.
“Emre.” Freja’s voice cuts through his terror, through his stilled heart. “Breathe. You’re scaring me.”
“Frej–” He hears the tremor in his own tone, feels the shaking of his body and the tears spilling out of his eyes. Is any of this real? Had it all just been a nightmare – no, he knows deep in his mind that he had lived all those unknown years, that he had become something else, that he had held Freja’s motionless body to his equally cold one.
Is he dead? Is that it? Is this the moment he tries to relive before the comfort of ceasing to exist finally comes? Is he finally free?
But he feels Freja’s arms wrap around him, so warm, so secure in her hold, that his mind tells him this is what’s real.
“I’ve got you,” she says into the crook of his neck, a hand on the back of his head pushing his shaking body closer to her grounded touch. She consoles him like this as he continues to cry, his own hands clutching at her desperately, praying he doesn’t wake up from this memory of her – of them from this time, still unhurt by the world.
He doesn’t know how long he stays in her embrace, how much tears he’s shed for the horrors of the years and the guilt of pulling her into his turmoil, how she can even stand being next to him after all that he’s put her through. He doesn’t know how any of this is possible, if he had found himself a second chance to choose correctly, to choose her; or if this is just another simulation to give him false hope –
“Hey,” Freja pulls away just far enough so she can look him in the eyes. “Emre. We’re going to try some more breathing, okay?”
He nods dumbly. She could be telling him anything and he would agree as long as she kept looking at him with her bright eyes.
“But I’m going to need you to stand up and go into your room with me. I’d hate for your parents to come back home to you like this. Is that alright?”
She helps him stand and leads him to his room. The sensation of his limbs feel so alien to him that it feels like he’s relearning how to walk just now without all the augmentation. He stumbles as though his own muscles had atrophied, but Freja supports him through it, reserving any judgement over his panic attack and sudden lack of coordination.
Once he’s sitting on his childhood bed with her, she grabs his hand and holds it over her chest, matching the one she’s placed on his. He feels the beat of her heart underneath his old shirt. It hadn’t given out, still beating on steadily in this new reality he’s found himself in.
“Close your eyes,” she tells him. Emre allows the sound of her breaths and the feel of her strong pulse to ground him when nothing else makes sense. In and out, he tries to follow. She grants him grace whenever he hiccups, her hand squeezing his gently to let him know she’s still there.
It’s all he can do to try to calm himself. His head lolls onto her shoulder, breaths shuddering as he reconciles the visions of the future, the one where he’s lost her, with this present moment.
“Don’t let me leave,” Emre pleads. How long does he have in this dream? Would asking for this much be enough to change anything?
He wants to tell her about it. About everything. How she’ll beg him to stay. How he leaves anyway. How it all goes horribly wrong. How she’ll find him again after all those years apart. How he’ll be the monster that becomes the end of her.
But no words for any of it come out.
“Were you going somewhere without me?” Freja jokes dryly, but still with that gentle tone of hers. He had praised her multiple times for her capability to keep her wits about her in such situations. It surprises him that he hasn’t scared her away like this.
But Freja had always stayed, even at his worst, no matter how many times he’s tried to push her away.
Freja’s quip helps lighten the somber mood somewhat, and Emre’s able to lift his head off from her shoulder just enough to lessen his weight on her, but still close enough that his breath falls right over her cheek, fanning over her pretty freckles, and that he can see the flecks in her green eyes. He doesn’t remember ever being this close to her before.
He thinks if he isn’t actually dead, then it just might kill him – going through another lifetime not having kissed her.
He leans in and puts his lips over hers tentatively, hovering for a few seconds as their eyes meet. A silent request for permission.
“Emre.” He feels the ghost of her breath over his own lips as she says his name, and he barely holds himself back from breathing her in then and there. “You… you don’t really want this.”
“Frej,” he says, coming closer, noses touching as he closes his eyes. “You don’t know how much I’ve wanted this.”
“You’re just vulnerable right now. I don’t… I don’t want to take advantage.”
“You’re not,” he assures her. If anything, he’s the one taking advantage of her kindness, of this moment – from being in the position of knowing how it could end, from being the one with so much regrets.
“We can’t,” she protests weakly, a myriad of excuses at the ready. He understands; he’s had the same list of reasons why they shouldn’t act on their feelings memorized, being the former stickler for protocol and decorum that he had been. They hadn’t talked about it even after they had found each other again, too preoccupied with the more pressing matter of his lack of autonomy and her need to rescue him.
Emre tries to focus back on this moment instead, how he can feel her heart quicken its pace beneath his touch. It’s enough to tell him she feels as he does. It’s the first time this morning that he feels light enough to let out a laugh.
They had been so young, and so worried over all the wrong things.
It’s also the first time in so long that he’s had such clarity, relieved of the droning and thrumming that haunted every thought and decision for years. He had never been more certain that this – she is his choice. She should have been from the very start.
“I’m yours, Frej.” If this is all a dream, then it could be his last chance to be honest with her, with himself. To tell her everything that he had ever meant to. “I’ve been in love with you for so long. You’re beautiful, you’re brilliant, you’re all I want. I don’t want to have any more regrets. I can’t–”
I can’t lose you again.
He had once believed that Freja’s youth would have been wasted on him. Now, he’s grateful for that impulsivity she still carries as she crashes her lips to his. There’s nothing graceful about it, and it makes him smile because that means it’s real. That she’s real. That he really is in this moment with her and she won’t just disappear.
As unfamiliar as his limbs still feel, Emre still manages to find a way to wrap an arm around her waist, drawing her closer to him, feeling the soft of her body push up against his as he deepens their kiss. This is real. His hands can't stop wandering as he continues to kiss her slow and sweet, the way he had always wanted to; mapping her, memorizing her. To let her be branded into him forever. The need to feel all of her eclipsing his fear of the world being pulled from beneath his feet.
Freja follows his cue and also moves to be more comfortable, lifting her legs up onto the bed and sitting on his lap, straddling him between her thighs. Her hands settle on his shoulders, fingers sliding along the nape of his neck and lacing through the ends of his short hair; her touch causing shivers to run down his spine – something he had forgotten his flesh could feel.
When they finally pull apart, it’s less from their need for air and more from the fact that they can both hear shuffling outside of Emre’s room, signalling his parents’ return. He opens his eyes to find her adorably flushed, her hands gripping the front of his shirt where the bionic eye would usually be, as though she’s the one needing to be grounded now.
“Are you… feeling any better?” she asks, her tone uncharacteristically mousy as she catches up with her breath. Cute, he thinks. He could get used to seeing her vulnerable like this, even when she’s concerned for him.
“Much,” he replies with a smile, planting a chaste kiss on her forehead. “I meant it, Freja. I want to be yours.”
He wants all that she’ll give him. He wants so badly to do everything right this time, to do right by her. To stand by her, just as she had when he had been turned into a sorry facsimile of a man. To give her the world she deserves. To make sure this world doesn’t turn her into something she never would have wanted for herself.
He just wants to love her properly.
“Alright,” she hums, shyly burrowing her face into his shoulder. “We’ll figure it out, yeah?”
“I promise,” he tells her, relaxing into her embrace. He could stay like this forever, forgetting about everything that isn’t her touch. Let those visions of the future fade away like a bad dream; the worries of Overwatch and Talon and whatever the world would throw at them be muted.
As long as they’re together, nothing else matters.
“Emre, oğlum, sen arkadaşınla mi?”
Well, maybe the first thing they could figure out is reintroducing Freja to his parents.