Disclaimer: I do not own Overwatch or any associated properties; tihs is purely for entertainment purposes with no monetary value.
Just for a moment, only for enough time to see that his life will be measured in seconds, Tekhartha Mondatta sees the world not as it could be, but as it must. At least for him. It is somewhat sobering.
He sees the people around him. His savior once again; he recognizes Lena Oxton, even years after she had saved him from Null Sector years ago. Even at a glance, she seems unchanged, and it only took a glance to see her swelling with joy at her people and his standing together in unison, as one within the gaze of the Iris. He had hoped, if possible, to speak with her again; there had been many things he would have liked to say for a human rushing to the aid of an Omnic so soon as a new war rushed upon them all, and pointless death coming to close them all.
Death. Pointless. Pitiless, suffering blinding them to what might be. He heard the whispers of the idea that struggle bred strength, and he doubted the wisdom in this. Suffering and discord, yes, they could be seeds of wisdom. Failure was instructive; the Omnic Crisis had taught him much, as he saw his people broken under the endless rage of the Omniums and humans die just as painfully as Omnics. Steel and flesh died the same, tearing or breaking, and the lights of a consciousness looked so very similar whether the vessel was organic or mechanical; a brief moment, rage or despair or stubbornness or surprise, and then... silence.
He watches her move, blink out of reality. She is gone for an instant, thinking too fast and working in a moment, and so she overlooks this. Mondatta does not have time to acknowledge this, and perhaps he would not have held it against her if he had.
He hears the scream of the rifle. The beginning of the bullet moving with deadly precision. And as Oxton shifts out of the space-in-time that the bullet shares space with for just long enough to avoid her death, he immediately knows what will happen.
He knows he is going to die several seconds before the bullet impacts his cranial plate, demolishing his central processor. The cascading chain reaction shuts him down in seconds; his internal fusion reactor sputters and dies, internal systems frying themselves without hope of recovery. The glow in his eyes fades out and it is only his power core losing the strength to keep him online, but it looks so very much like human eyes closing as they die.
Mondatta spent his entire life thinking and trying to do the right thing, even as everything around him inevitably slid closer into something like the human conception of Hell. Things seemed to always be getting worse; one year's constant mistrust and hatred flared the next year into outright war and calls to annihilate humanity or robots. Kill them before they kill us, his brothers, sisters and other demand, pointing to a legion of offenses against their kind. The sealing away of Anubis, the murder of the Rainbow Serpent. The depravities and callous murder in King's Row, where no human blinked if an Omnic was beaten to death in front of their own home. The humans made them and then tried to put them down; they would never stop trying to kill us, make them pay for what they've done-
And yet, and yet. He cannot believe that war is their only hope to survive. He will not. Mondatta's processors dedicate a considerable amount of resources to staring down that bullet and refusing to acknowledge that wholesale murder would ever change things. He would not want to live in a world where he is a person only because all humanity is dead. The bullet flies, and Mondatta gazes into it, and past it.
He sees into his death, and sees past it. Very well, he thinks, and in other circumstances he might be embarrassed to have such a mild reaction to his life measured in nano-seconds. Zenyatta would tease him mercilessly, certainly.
Mondatta has only seconds. Just enough time to see his death, and barely enough time to acknowledge it. Omnic minds work differently than humans; the end result is the same – and hasn't he just spoken at length about that, trying to hammer language around the idea that flesh and steel, blood and oil, heart and power source, were fundamentally one – and they process things more quickly. They have leisure to consider things. They do not think better, just... have more time to consider them in.
Mondatta has enough time to know he's going to die in front of a crowd that came to hear him speak what resonated what lay in the gaze of their souls. A flicker of irritation rises in him; if nothing else, the people that want him dead are being awfully inconsiderate to the people around him. Agenda is one thing, but there is such a thing as being genteel. On the killing fields of Siberia and elsewhere, his mind being ground down into a red-hot wire by the death around him and the horror of what he was doing and the dead beneath him – Omnic and human, corpses alike, all one in death, blood and conductor fluid pool out in just the same way, and his first thought of universal oneness came around death and the sickening realization of what he was doing, what have I DONE-
There he had promised himself that if he must live in a world where the only sane thing to do was to refuse to raise a hand in violence, even in his own defense, where all he could do was speak truth and hope that others believed that Omnics dreamed of a world where nobody else had to die for them to live, and there would always be people that would end lives because it suited their interests, that if he had to meet such people that they should at least be charming.
The bullet passes far enough, and Oxton's blur fades through time sufficiently that he has a glimpse of his murderer. A woman. Her skin an inhuman shade of blue, the visor on her forehead giving her the odd appearance from so far away that she is a human spider.
He sees her. He sees who she is. The blood on her hands, the tears she would weep if the ability to even know her regrets hadn't been sliced away from her. There is a ghost about her, perhaps only in her own mind, and he understands.
(Tekhartha Mondatta had never met Amelie Lacroix, nor her husband. He could not make out the details of her face this far away, and he would not have recognized her even if he had. Pain and suffering, though, makes all souls like family. He does not know her, but he does know that this act is not her will. He was a tool once, a weapon of war and agent of his people's rage, their hatred at being born and then betrayed by their gods.
Like calls to like. He understands, even if he doesn't know the details.)
The bullet is close now.
He spares a moment to think sorrowfully of the people in the crowd, humans and Omnics alike seeing exactly the same; it was only moments ago that they were bound together to listen to what he had to say, and the truth in his words resonating in them. He felt it, as surely as he had felt reality blooming like a flower ages ago when he taught Zenyatta how to find the bits of harmony in the world, even when it was burning around you. These people are here because of him, they will suffer because of him.
Very neat. Make his death a message, perhaps? An interesting question. He hoped others would think to ask it. Zenyatta would, or so he believed.
Mondatta sees the people in the crowd, and the threads that make them up weave together. It is not a physical light, and yet his mind translates it as such. Most of it is space, not empty but a place for things to be in, and also those things at the same time, a paradox of existence defining themselves. Much of it looks very similar, these threads of soul, and at the same time. All completely unique. Shining against them, like sun wound against the world, the bits where they resonate together, golden and white, not so much illuminating the world as moving beyond it to other planes of being; he can see how they come together, how they are one in this terrible moment.
There is purple and darker colors there, shades of discord binding them to impulse. Fear binds them. Doubt plagues them. Pain cuts them, even as these provide handholds to transform themselves in some fashion. But the darkness of discord is not so bright as the harmony flowing through though, not so much binding them together as they are simply resonating with the same feelings, such similar wavelengths, that they are beyond it.
It is there in the crowd. It is there, flowing in the sky as if upon the lashes of an eye shut before a world that will not gaze back. It is there above him, shining like a new star in the woman who tried to save him a second time. Tried, failed, just as he has done so many times. If he could, he would embrace her and promise Lena Oxton that it's nothing to fret about-
And Mondatta sees it in the woman behind the rifle, with the dead eyes. Her gaze barely flickers. Not with focus, but... restrained. Bound. Permitted only to gaze in specific ways, unable to even approach the idea of doing it in any other way. Again; her hands carry out his death, but he does not think that it is her doing.
And again, once upon a time, he was a killer too.
There is just enough time for his thoughts to flow together, mixing with such beautiful harmony that it is a music within him, a spark igniting into a blazing flame. Fire illuminates, and he gazes onward, and he understands.
There is not enough time.
He barely notices the bullet. He has enough awareness to acknowledge the piercing in his cranial plate, in a surprisingly detached way that baffles him – my skull has been compromised and it doesn't bother me that much, oh dear, Zenyatta would never stop finding ways to work in head puns somewhere – and then-
There is no more time. This vessel lets go.
Beyond Lena Oxton's cries of horror split the night, and her demands to understand why fall upon Amelie's deafened ears, Mondatta's broken mind has enough time to remember before his gaze moves onward from this life.
He does not remember the painful lessons won in the First Omnic Crisis; the original lessons he learned, miserable and too full of suffering he endured and inflicted, and taught him that understanding that comes from pain is all the worse if it was suffering you made. He does not remember meetings with the original Overwatch Strike Team, and the shock at seeing them regard him as an equal convince him that there was hope in the end; Morrison's fervent defense of the Omnics, Reyes' ferocious declaration that there was enough death in the world now, Reinhardt Wilhelm shaking his head before all the world to see, Ana Amari relieved to lower her gun in safety before an Omnic, even Torbjorn Lindholm nodding very curtly at him.
Nor does Tekhartha Mondatta remember kinder lessons. Those first years in the chilly heights of Nepal; the construction of the Shambali Monastery, long nights with his brethren as they contemplated how to fold the truths they had glimpsed into doctrine and wisdom all could understand s they did. Standing on the heights and looking into the wintry air, the cold wind comforting on his warm frame, his mind reaching into the wireless well of thought Omnics and humans like had build, where here he could feel like he gazed upon the most radiant part of the world; not material things but words alone, a world built of thought and sentience. Where he gently bade his brother goodbye, and-
Yes. That. These are the thoughts that are with Mondatta as he leaves the world, gently oblivious to the misery and despair of a world that is no longer his burden. His thoughts are with Tekhartha Zenyatta.
"You are too hot-headed, brother," Zenyatta chides him after one heated argument too many, and long games where laughter cleans away the anger still simmering there. Zenyatta's gentle rebukes when a Shambali sister grimly suggests it might be best to hide here on Nepal until the humans learn from their mistakes and find peace without them having to do it for them; "We mustn't stay here, preaching dogma. If we are truly the same, I think it follows that we show it. We must go. Speak with them, help the world. If nothing else... getting them used to Omnics going about and making terrible jokes will acclimatize them to our existence, yes?"
Laughing. There was always so much laughter when Zenyatta was with them. When he read Zenyatta's letters aloud, or received letters from Zenyatta and his fascinating pupil – always with interesting comments in the margins, both Zenyatta's inexplicably lazy and yet precise scrawl, quite the contrast to his student's patient penmanship, even if it was honestly hard to read in hands not used to anything besides bringing war. And laughing when he left the monastery and spoke to people who had met Zenyatta and remembered him, often with rueful smiles.
Mondatta remembered leaving the monastery after too long arguing Zenyatta's point and deciding, yes, they needed to speak with humanity. No more hiding from the world they helped destroy, no more pretending they didn't have blood on their hands. He remembered walking the world, full of mistrustful gazes and hateful words, and yet never feeling more at peace with his life.
It had brought him to his death, and yet. A few flickering bit of processes considered this and examined it from every angle. Alternatives were suggested and followed through. A logical question presented itself. Do I regret coming to this end?
A vague awareness; a crowd of people around him, wanting to help him, make this not have happened. A woman who had grown up in the horrors of the Omnic Crisis, and yet had still looked up to him. More memories, rising up like lotus flowers through stubborn muck; humans and Omnics of every shape and potential form, greeting him as a brother. On every land, in every nation he'd ever walked. Languages he might never speak or understand buzzing around him, and the brotherhood there regardless. In the hopeful spaces of Numbani, upon the glittering spires of Oasis; in the broken places where the Omnic War had ravaged Detroit, in every stretch and shape of the world: he had seen it everywhere. A gorilla that spoke as a human or Omnic, shyly proffering a book for an autograph and asking if he could make it out to Winston and Athena; Mondatta had seen the future in that miracle, someone far more alien to humanity than Omnics were, and yet with eyes that shone with such hope.
Hope, everywhere he looked. Affirmed and recognized. He had seen the shape of more war, and even more often, he had seen the desperate sureness that this was a bigger world than he thought. For every act of nihilistic horror, he had seen two things that were roots for something better. He'd seen in the last Crusader, an order found to destroy his people, defending him from Null Sector and demanding them to explain the honor in this. He'd seen humanity accept his people into Overwatch, the organization founded to save humanity from his people, and he thought this certain evidence that the gap between those two peoples was fading away.
Like an eye, closing in acknowledgment of the truth.
The process completes. Had he a mouth, he would have smiled. There isn't a need for regret, not here and now.
And time is gone for him, and as consciousness fades away, he thinks of his brother.
Months pass. The cycle of the world turns anew.
As Talon resurfaces again, calling the world to war, dreaming of violence forcing the world to reshape itself or burn away, and it's leader is a man empowered by machinery, his heart as cold and grim as a steel blade-
Overwatch gathers anew, in a Watchpoint long since seemingly abandoned. And within that Watchpoint, the symbol of Overwatch neatly sewn into a threadbare robe still bright with the colors of the Shambali, there is a machine that thinks and feels and reasons, and the spark of him is bright and warm as the sun breaking through winter.
Mondatta is gone. But the world he spoke of is not yet gone. And between the fingers of Tekhartha Zenyatta, there is the youngest sphere.
They flow around him, emanating harmony and discord in turn. Songs of understanding, of healing. And songs to instruct through adversity, to understand the benefits of failure.
Each orb, channeling the energy of his Omnic body, was the shell of one he called brother, or sister, or simply friend. One who fell in the Omnic Crisis, proclaiming that this war wouldn't be worth surviving even if they want, and walked into the path of a Bastion's turret before it could stop firing; Zenyatta would always remember the sound of the Bastion unit screaming in horror, and his sister's silence. Another, a hacker who had dug too deeply into secrets too dangerous for anyone, and who had waited in the cold for his trackers to catch up with him.
Now, it was Mondatta with him. Mondatta's soul was gone, his gaze turned away from this world. And yet, considered Zenyatta, as the sphere moved...
Seemingly, if you allowed yourself to believe, on its own...
Mondatta's work was not done, and there was a fine framework to build upon.
He leaned close to the sphere, and it was warm in a way that had nothing to do with its internal mechanisms or Zenyatta's exertions.
Zenyatta contemplated the sphere, and he spoke quietly.
"Yes, my brother. I understand."
And the Watchpoint filled, with the light not of harmony, but of transcendence.