#late night vent writing
Satya had always imagined that love would feel so horrifically empty, but it does not feel that way at all.
In her youth, it tapped into her veins and bled her like roots. It twisted all of the emotion out of her with a slow, aching viciousness she hadn’t known could exist. She tripped over people she could not have and loved them too much and it was as if she were blazing through an entire lifetime’s worth of firewood until she was desperately trying to catch fire to curled ashes with mere splinters of flint and tinder, her fingers too bruised to strike the spark.
The emptiness in her hurt. And by all rights, it shouldn’t have, because it was not real.
It was not tangible. It was not visible. It was not corporeal in any form. It was a figment, a concept; it was an unfortunate composition of snapping synapses and misfiring neurons and a dearth of dopamine. Something so lacking should not feel like a palm pressed into her ribs, bearing down with a crushing weight that might suffocate her should she pause long enough to dare an inhale, and yet it did.
Vishkar helped in its own way, but it only gave her the ability to make something out of that terrible nothing. And even then, even with all of Vishkar’s perfect rhetoric and visionary brilliance, she could not truly make something out of nothing. Light exists even in the darkest of places, albeit in particles and scintillae—and despite the emptiness and the ache and all the things she wished she could have said, done, accomplished, the light existed in her still, still, albeit in particles and scintillae, and she wielded them with an open palm.
From broken universes between her lungs, she spun them together. She bathed in her own dying starlight and created a cosmos for the world because if fate did not see fit to assuage the tumult shrapneled through her bloodstream, then she would give until it did. The world did not need more places like Hyderabad, like Rio; the world did not need places that would leech at its children until they starved. She would see the wrongs of the world made right, even if it meant sacrifice—slash and burn what is dead and dying, as that is the price for regrowth.
Sacrifice did not make her feel any less empty.
Sacrifice did not stopper the guilt for each thing slashed and burned.
Then came the precipice: choose the path she had always walked with a future already in place, or choose something new that would guarantee nothing and no one.
Being a creature of habit and constant routine did not make the decision easier, but Satya chose, and she chose with intuition. She cast aside complacency and a choking safety net in favor of something she believed might truly make the world a better place. If Vishkar would dare to raze the world in their misguided sense of order, then she would choose to be the regrowth. She would choose to build in the ashes. She would choose to rekindle what was lost regardless of the state of her flint and tinder.
It was not Overwatch itself that was the trigger. It was neither the people nor the relationships nor the work. It might have been an amalgam of them all, in truth, but it was independence most of all.
Two months in, that tender pain stemming from beneath her breastbone began to dwindle. Six months in, it dwindled a little more. A year passed, and it felt like the phantom pains that would plague what was left of her arm: aching and unbearable and overwhelming some nights, while others the barest of lingering stings. Each day brought its own set of challenges, and each day she would face them with conviction despite the traveling shrapnel; she grew stronger because the environment encouraged it, bolstered it, fostered it, fed it, not demanded it.
Perhaps that was the foundation. (If the foundation is askew, the building will never be structurally sound.) Healing oneself is a painstaking process, and she did not take it lightly.
He… helped. In his own way.
He was not like Vishkar. Things like corporate ladders and bureaucratic policies did not apply to him; he tore them down and set them ablaze and reveled in the freedom that no one could tell him what to do because hewas the one who decided his own fate, not some posh entourage of suited bigwigs whose only available lens was colored green.
(Not that he didn’t see green, but he saw a great many other colors, too.)
And it was a thing of strangeness, of unfamiliarity, because she had been integrated with others of her ilk for so very long that any deviation seemed like a loud, cacophonous crash. His specialty was indeed loud, cacophonous crashes, but it was also wordplay and laughter and little details no one else would think to see, and that was enough to muffle the din. He builtthings as much as he destroyed them; he breathed life into gimmicks and gizmos and gadgets made not from hard-light, not from miraculous technology bestowed upon him by a benevolent corporate giant, but from assorted pieces of disassembled and decimated things.
If you really think about it, everything’s just scrap in the end, he’d said with a grin, the red of a grenade shell poised between his thumb and forefinger. No point in letting it all go to waste. Why not build what you want? If you’ve got heaps of pieces all over the place, might as well make something of ‘em, yeah?
And so she made something of them. Slowly, gradually, she harnessed the particles and scintillae and spun their curtains inward until her foundation was flawless and her supports were adamantium and all that remained was the inevitable design that she’d thought herself so capable of creating—and it was then, she thinks, that she really began to notice.
The pressure exacting over her heart was no longer present. That insistent palm splayed over her ribs and digging between the slats did not exist. There was no consuming sensation of being made smaller, of compacting, of being pushed in, of collapsing on the vacancy within. In fact, it felt as if her heart were full, brimming, replete; it felt like it might spill out of her and run down her chin with the sheer amount of volume contained in such a small and scarred thing.
Love (for herself, for her friends, for him) was not—is not—an emptiness. It might be just as intangible, just as invisible, just as incorporeal, but it doesn’t hurt like that wretched, wrenching thing that had swallowed her heart and left her spent and aching all those years ago.
Satya sketches a line down his cheekbone. He snores beside her, stilled, dreaming.
Love is not horrific. It is not a bed of curled ash or a terrible nothing. Love is not empty.
It is real.
