Hello :) I hope you can like this fic! I took vague inspiration from a fanart I've seen a bit ago, so I decided to work on this. It's a sentai!Genji and Cultist!Zenyatta but with a twist, so it's an AU. Please review if you like! You can also find it on AO3 under my penname Lacertae :)

Chapters updated weekly! prologue is short, normal chapters are longer :)

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Rating: Mature for fighting scenes n the like, just to be safe

Warnings: none.

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Prologue

It had been a year and a day since it had happened.

Zenyatta had been meditating, then, floating a few inches above a rock on a secluded shore, his face plate turned towards the sea.

It had been a bleak day, the sky grey and cloudy and the sea looking almost tumultuous, but Zenyatta had not minded –there was a certain beauty to be found even on such days, unrest in the air like a charge that he could almost taste.

The sea was still beautiful, even with this weather, and the waves crashing against the beach was pleasant to his auricular receptors just as much as their sight was for his optical ones.

He had been meditating, but not too deeply, for he enjoyed the sight and he would not linger much longer in this area, soon to return to his brothers and sister at the monastery, when something had fallen nearby, making a soft sound against the sand.

Zenyatta's optical receptors had powered up, surprised, and he had searched his surroundings, noticing that a little to the side, there was a small black ball which at first had looked completely blank, but as he hovered closer, curious, he could make out carvings all over its surface, just as dark as the metal of the ball itself.

He had never seen anything such as this before.

Still, even in his curiosity, he had not reached for the ball and had instead searched around himself. There was no one else anywhere, and he was not close enough to the water that it could have been washed to the shore…

With a click, the ball had moved one inch, and Zenyatta, startled, had looked back at it in time to see it shiver and then unravel upon itself, dissipating into a cloud of black mist.

He had no time to do anything, because then the mist grew in size, and his senses were assaulted with an incredible, overpowering Discord –enough that he staggered backwards, losing control over his hovering to fall closer to the sand, and then…

And then the mist had dawned on him, like a wave of darkness, submerging him.

In the minutes that followed, Zenyatta had known pain unlike any other.

What had looked like simple dark mist had been in truth thousands of nanomachines, smaller than the smallest he'd seen until then. They had attached themselves to every inch of his body, interfacing with his mainframe, connecting with the sensors and overcoming his defences, bugging out his program.

Zenyatta had dropped down, narrowly avoiding hitting the back of his head against a rock, and rolled onto the sand, choking on a sudden scream of pain.

The nanomachines violently fought to swarm inside him, and they were everywhere, and Zenyatta could feel them work, though he had no idea what they were doing.

Sand grated against his chassis and wriggled inside his body as he writhed and twitched, unable to escape the sudden assault that was everywhere around him.

The mala which had been dormant around his neck had fallen and rolled away from him, and Zenyatta, in an instinctive attempt to get away from the pain, had reached out one arm towards them, but to no avail –his connection with them was abruptly cut off, and another fresh wave of pain travelled through his servos, filling every wire and circuit with mind-numbing agony.

Zenyatta had fought against it –he could feel the nanomachines interfacing with his circuits, eroding his chassis, injecting him with new program data, reshaping parts of his body, changing him– but to no avail.

The pain was too strong for his processors to take or sort through, overwhelming in its intensity, and it had left him gasping and sobbing and clawing at the sand as he could feel, more than see, his body change and adapt to the new program overpowering him.

The nanomachines fought, and he fought back, anchoring his brain processes against the pain and standing his ground and when he'd thought he could no longer stall their advance, he had called upon the Iris, desperate and frantic, as a last resort.

The Iris had answered, a single second of mercy from the pain, golden light shining through the crevices of his body, glowing from the inside, pushing against the nanomachines but then–

–it was cut off.

Abruptly snuffed out, the Iris disappeared from under his touch, and it felt to Zenyatta as if something had been severed from him, the loss like a physical blow.

Shocked, in pain and alone, Zenyatta was left to scream and writhe and suffer as the nanomachines reworked him. For what felt like forever, he'd only known pain, and only when they were done was he allowed reprise, and the pain finally receded.

For a long time, Zenyatta had remained curled up in a ball of misery on the sand, uncaring about the grains grinding against his circuits, tired and aching and recovering from the pain that had fried so many of his sensors.

His servos responded to his check-up program, but his processes were sluggish, most of them barely online, and his battery had been depleted enough that red warnings flashed past his blurred subconscious, alerting him he was close to shutting down.

Yet, he made himself move.

Slowly, haltingly, he learned the new shapes of his body as he dragged his heavy frame across the sand and out of the beach area, synth cracking as it was flooded with sand grains.

It would take him hours longer to be able to stand up, realising that in this state he could barely control himself , let alone hover. It would take him longer to catalogue fully how much his body had changed, the new parts that had been added, his new appearance.

And then, some more time to find out he could no longer touch the Iris, nor feel its kind, gentle warmth shine inside his core, replaced with something colder, purple and vengeful.

Zenyatta had changed, and with that, he'd been forced away from his path and left on a different one, alone and stranded.