Heart of Courage Freja Skov & Apocalypse Warrior Emre Sarıoğlu on Kanezaka & Hollywood (Night) 🎀💎
THEY!! ARE EXTREMELY MAGICAL GIRL ROMANCE SUBPLOT CODED TO ME!!! Heart of Courage Freja helps Hollow Hearts Emre overcome the evil magical mind control with the power of love!!! DO YOU SEE IT. DO YOU SEE MY VISION.
Thank you as ever to @steelart for their absolutely stellar performance of looking pretty as Emre. ✨
All images are composed & captured inside Overwatch, often noclipping or flying via custom games, using heroes' existing skins & emotes!
Freja's little stoat friend is named Galanthis, by the way. 💕
Please let me know if you need a better look at any angles or details I didn't catch. No need to credit me if you use any of these as a reference, just please don't wholesale repost them without credit or claim them as your own, thanks!
The main post of references for Freja's Heart of Courage skin is over here!
For a more detailed look at Freja's default crossbow, look over here!
Please let me know if you need a better look at any angles or details I didn't catch. No need to credit me if you use any of these as a reference, just please don't wholesale repost them without credit or claim them as your own, thanks!
Reference shots of Freja's stoat, Galanthis, and her Dokiwatch crossbow are over here!
Summary: Freja gets her period and the debilitating migraine associated with it.
Emre helps. He shouldn't, she thinks. It's not fair.
1788 words
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Freja wakes to her lower stomach trying to tear itself apart. Bright cramps, pooling just above her hip bones.
Goddamn fucking IUD- it’d expelled last month and now she’s having to deal with menstrual cycles again. She’d figured she’d be able to get a new one after turning in just one more job, and of course that “job” had turned into. . . this.
Now she’s laying on a Talon cot in her own little officer’s quarters. Bleeding out onto the bleach-white sheets. There’s a little wavy spot in her vision as she stares at the ceiling, the same place it always does. She has maybe fifteen minutes before the migraine begins.
She rolls out of bed and sprints to the tiny attached toilet/shower combo off her room. But it’s too late- her shorts are already soaked through. Everywhere she touches stains the white porcelain.
Her head starts to throb by the time she finishes stemming the flow with a pair of the most absorbent tampons money can buy, then cleaning up the rest of herself so she doesn’t drip across the floor when she waddles back to her wardrobe to grab fresh clothing. Then it’s back to the toilet to finish installing the rest of the absorbing padding required for her to lay down on her back without making a mess.
Then she finally, finally returns to bed and shuts her eyes. Dull lightning pulses behind her eye sockets. Her ears ring. She groans and presses her forehead into her pillow.
It isn’t like Talon offers international health insurance, and her odds of returning to her native Denmark in the next year are slim to none. And she is not going to present herself to what Talon called their ‘medical division’; the mere idea of Moira O’Deorain being allowed anywhere near her gynecological health makes her more nauseous than the cramping already is.
So fine. She’ll tough it out. Like she'd toughed it out through high school and college before she got the right diagnosis.
. . . but for the first day of her cycle like this, Talon and everyone in it can go fuck themselves on a strip of barbed wire. She’s not letting them drag her out on a mission. Not today.
In a moment of timing that confirms whatever twisted deity runs the universe hates her, there’s a knock on the door.
She stays still and silent.
Another knock, louder this time.
Freja’s going to kill whoever’s on the other side of that door. She’s going to kill them. She can hear a man’s voice, but it’s too muffled for her to figure out who.
She gets out of bed. Smooths down her hair. Runs a hand down her face to set it into a neutral expression. Each step towards the door introduces a new pulse of pain behind her eyes. She forces it down.
She cracks open the door. “Skov speaking.”
“Freja! Are you alright?”
Her chin curls towards her chest from the brightness of Emre’s voice.
“I’m fine.” She says. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me- it’s almost 9AM. And you weren’t responding, so I got worried.”
“I’m fine.” She says in the most convincing tone she can muster. “Leave me alone.”
She can hear his breath hit the doorframe. “Not feeling well?”
She sighs. “Migraine. Now go?”
“I’ll get you a bag of ice. Shouldn’t be too hard around here.”
Cold against her temples sounds heavenly. Anything to cool the red-hot pain. Conversely, she fantasizes about a blanket fresh from the dryer for the cramps happening between her hips.
She hears Emre take a step. She cracks the door open wider. One of the door hinges creaks.
“Yeah?” He turns around. She’s met with the look of blatant concern in his eyes. How is he able to do that with just his eyes?
“Get me a heating pad also?” She whispers.
“On it. Get comfortable, alright?”
He walks off. She limps back to bed. With practiced tension in every joint of her body, she manages to lower herself down without making the ache in her head any worse.
She doesn’t know how much time passes before Emre returns. He opens the door. The first part of him to enter is the red-orange light from the screen on his chest, though the iris dims as it registers the darkness. He turns around to shut the door behind himself and she can see his shadow cringe when the door hinges squeak.
His footsteps are silent as he crosses the small quarters to her bedside.
“Fresh cold pack. Stole it straight from the medic’s office. Upgrade from just regular ice, right?” He whispers as he sets the white package down on her nightstand. “Should last a few hours at least.”
“Mhmm.”
“And the heating pad. Where do you want it?”
She grabs it and lays it across her stomach.
“Ah. I see.” He nods solemnly. “Have you taken any painkillers?”
She sighs. “It’s fine.”
“Let me get some for you.”
He leaves the room before she can say that it’s fine. In his absence, she perches the ice pack across the bridge of her nose.
It helps shield her eyes from the light of the screen on his chest when he returns. The iris doesn’t adjust to the darkness this time; she can see flickers through the ice pack as it moves.
“Sorry,” Emre whispers. “Here. I’ll leave this-”
A dial-up noise, from the earbud of her comm device on her desk. A similar noise spills from around Emre’s head. He dashes across the room to silence hers, and she makes out bits and pieces of the words from where the call blasts in his ear.
“MISSION ASSIGNMENT. . . ARRIVAL IN KANEZAKA AT. . . SARIOĞLU AND SKOV-”
Emre gasps. Something like electricity crackles. Freja pulls the icepack off her eyes.
Emre freezes in place, shoulders tense, clenching both his real palm and the water bottle he’s holding in his cybernetic one. The iris flashes. The light from it reflects off the mirror and into her eyes, and she grunts in pain before she can stop herself.
The full brunt of the iris’s gaze falls onto her bed. She can do nothing but squeeze her eyelids shut and hide the wince as best she can.
But then the light shuts off. She cracks open her eyes, only to see Emre’s glowing blank against the dark. Her heart jumps in her chest. She lets out the panic as a long, slow exhale.
The entity possessing him looks down to his hands. It curls open his palm, revealing a handful of ibuprofen. The iris on his chest blinks back on, at a brightness setting barely visible against the black of the screen, and it stares at the pills for a few seconds.
Emre’s head turns to look at her.
She has her knife under her pillow but that won’t do much against- against- she’d left her bola and all her other real weapons in the wardrobe across the room.
His- its hands trail towards her.
One fist tilts. Five pills clink, one after another, against the nightstand.
Then it opens the water bottle and sets it beside the pills.
It steps back, and then it stomps out of the room, slamming the door shut behind itself. When her world stops spinning from the adrenaline, when the loudness stops hammering into her skull, she coaxes herself into a sitting position and grabs the flashlight on her nightstand.
She squints and inspects the pills. They all look. . . normal. Unadulterated, she thinks. She turns the flashlight off and against more cautious judgement, she throws all of the pills in her mouth and washes them down with water from the freshly-opened water bottle.
She lays her head back, resettles her ice pack over her eyes, and surrenders to the pain for the next few hours.
—
Emre stumbles back into her room late in the day. She didn’t realize she’d left the door unlocked. She can tell it’s him, though, by the unevenness in his gait.
He gets close enough for her to see that his eyes are empty of any sort of light, even the usual spark.
Freja should sit up. She needs to sit up. Needs to say that she is fine and ask how the mission went. That’s the least she should do, for breaking her promise to keep an eye on him, just because her stupid uterus threw a fucking fit. Like it did for half the entire human race, and yet she’s too weak-willed to push through it.
But before she can will her muscles to move, Emre slides down against the side of her bed and leans his head back into the mattress. He rubs his face and exhales into his palms.
Freja swallows. “Em-?”
“Shhh, it’s okay.” Emre uncovers his face. “Everything’s alright.”
He reaches up and places his hand, his real hand, over her own.
He was the one who just came back from a mission, and he was trying to comfort her?
This isn’t right. It isn’t right. She’s failing him, failing him at the one goddamned promise she swore she was going to keep this time. Instead she’s running away from it. Like she always does.
She should be better than this.
“ . . . the mission?” She forces out of her throat as she pulls her hand away. “How did it go?”
“I’m alright. Get some rest. I’ll be here.”
“Be here?”
“To keep watch. You’re safe.”
She doesn’t know what to feel; the first emotion in her chest is indignation. She’d forgotten to lock the door, but that doesn’t mean she’s. . . helpless, like this. She is no slouch with the knife under her pillow, so long as her combatant was anyone other than the nigh-impervious machine simmering beneath his skin.
And this was certainly out of line from anything he’d ever done back in Overwatch. But that was a decade ago- this is now, after nine or ten years of. . . him waking up in random cities with no recollection of how he’d gotten there.
. . . he probably wished he’d had someone to watch over him whenever he was ill.
The thought threatens to make her cry, which spikes her pulse, which brings a new hammering of pain to her eye sockets. God, she doesn’t deserve someone like him. Least of all now.
Although maybe this was helping him feel better, too. He’d said similar things, about not deserving anything. Maybe he thinks he’s paying back whatever debt he thinks he owes.
And if that’s the case, then. . . she’ll allow it.
She lowers her hand over the side of the mattress. Her fingers land first in his hair, then onto his shoulder, and then he takes her hand in his.
Do you have some Illari headcanons? I love all her hcs and she's kind of forgetful. Sorry for any inconvenience
Illari is often forgotten!! She shouldn't be, it's not fair. I'll be the first to admit that I don't typically read any fanfics for her, so I'm not sure what her common fanon is- but here's my takes, tehehe
Her powers are influenced by her emotions.
This was true for all Inti warriors, which is why they had an emphasis on discipline. This was also the reason Illari was the youngest-ever Inti warrior- before the accident, she was famous among her peers for being able to keep a level head in stressful situations.
After the accident, of course. . . she keeps all of her emotions on absolute lockdown.
(Mind you, she's not as dangerous as she thinks she is. It wasn't only her power that overloaded the solar threading machine on the day of the accident. But since she doesn't yet have the evidence to confirm that, she treats herself like she was the sole cause, and stresses out constantly about something similar happening again.)
In the most terribly ironic twist, sudden bright flashes of light are the biggest trigger for her PTSD. It took her months to stop flinching from her own powers, and she's still working on everything else. Bright LED advertising signboards at night are her biggest nemesis.
Anyways, moving on from her powers-
While calling her "sheltered" would be in poor taste, she did grow up in a tight-knit secretive community of warrior-protectors. Sometimes it shows. She lacks experience with people most of all. Her main method of covering for this is being cold and abrupt with everyone, regardless of who they are.
She adores hiking and backpacking. She's always wanted to visit the national parks of the world. Her niche bucket-list picks are Northern Cascades National Park in the U.S. and the Valley of Flowers National Park in India.
She religiously maintains and polishes her own gear. It helps her calm down when she's stressed. Which is all well and good until her gun is spotless and gleaming and the only thing she's doing at that point is wearing down the paint.
She skips the coffee, skips the energy drinks, and goes straight for those caffeine energy shot things whenever she feels drowsy. Coffee is a recreational beverage to her; if she actually needs energy, she prefers "a more precise tool".
(Even D.va, as the resident energy drink queen, thinks Illari's a little insane for this)
S/O headcanons:
Illari will stoically refuse all PDA when the two of you are in public but will smother you in affection when alone
She wants to take care of you. She wants to take care of you so badly. Doesn't mind if your taste in care from her leans subby or dommy- she can be both.
Has a wild possessive streak over you without meaning to. She has trouble trusting people, but now that she's let herself get close to you? Oh man.
You know she loves you if she allows herself to sing in front of you. If you also sing, or play any sort of musical instrument, she'd be thrilled to sing with you.
She really wants to teach you Quechua!!! Please let her, even if you're not that great at languages. She'd be so excited.
If you pull her head onto your lap and run your fingers through her hair, she'll fall asleep on the spot.
Okay, another topic. About potential cyborg angst between Genji and Emre, what about Sojourn? From what I wrote from my draft about her design, she had to receive cybernetics when she was a kid due to a rare autoimmune disease (I was hinting autoimmune myositis if it affected her muscles). And then, she received super advanced cybernetics to become a super strategic soldier that she is today, and I also wrote something about cyberpsychosis in my draft, and how it would affect Sojourn in some way. Maybe it's not cyberpsychosis, but rather a different dissociative disorder that still affects one's humanity, or a doubt of humanity. You're a fellow lorekeeper, so what form of cyborg angst do you reckon dear Vivian suffers from?
I think my primary flavor of cyborg angst for our dear Sojourn is this: it's implied that she was one of the first ever full-body (or relatively full-body) cyborgs in the Overwatch universe. While Genji certainly received alienating treatment from others after he received his cybernetics, Vivian had to fight for and insist on her personhood every step of the way, alone.
She was stared at for decades before cybernetics became more commonplace. She had to answer everyone's invasive questions. She had to be a constant advocate for herself. And during the Crisis? People were terrified of her based on looks alone. There might have been a tiny handful of other people in the world at that point with cybernetics, but we know that none of them were in her area or were a part of Overwatch.
She's not allowed on civilian airliners. This is even the case in present canon, where cybernetics are normalized. Back in the day? I imagine it was ten times worse. Getting barred from stadiums, malls, even restaurants and bars for "security concerns" or "not wanting to frighten patrons". She constantly had to fight those sorts of battles.
I don't think she has much trauma from the installation of her cybernetics themselves- she had a great medical support team. They helped her through the transitions, the physical therapy, and beyond. It's more than possible there were hiccups in the process- times where her health was in jeopardy, or times that her prosthetics weren't tuned right for how she wanted to move. But Vivian's always prized having a level head, so she likely kept in touch with therapists over the years to work through any anxieties she has about her perception of her own body. She still has issues with some things when it comes to her cybernetics, and maybe she always will, but self-acceptance is not one of those. She's worked hard to have that.
Below is a bit of a ramble on my personal thoughts about "cyberpsychosis" as a trope- it turned a touch negative, so I'm putting it beneath the cut. I'm very picky about my cyborg angst, personally.
---
Thank you for this ask, and please don't take this the wrong way, but I have my. . . issues, with the concept of "cyberpsychosis", only because I don't believe that any modification to the human body inherently makes you "less human". Are there other traumas associated with cybernetic upgrades? Absolutely! Whether that trauma comes from:
the physical health issue or violent incident that forced you to get your cybernetic upgrades (almost all the amputees/cyborgs in the cast)
the violation of autonomy that comes from not having a say in your cybernization process (Genji and Emre both fall here)
or from having the specialized medical care needed to maintain your cybernetic body withheld/threatened to be withheld from you (Genji Genji Genji 100%, also applies to Hazard's initial experience with his cybernetics from Overwatch)
or by attaching weapons to your body, and thus undergoing a similar but more personal form of the mental health issues that soldiers undergo as people who's job it is to kill other human beings (Sojourn and Torbjorn being the most affected by this one,)
or by having people treat you differently because of your cybernetics (which is my main headcanon for Sojourn, also applies to Genji)
-there's a lot of reasons that cybernetics can cause angst. Even the cybernization process itself, purely as an intensive medical procedure, could cause trauma. Sojourn was already in and out of hospitals on the regular since she was a child, and being in that position really sucks.
But the cybernetics themselves?
. . . that's like saying that using a wheelchair is inherently dehumanizing. Or, in the case of more recreational/medically-unnecessary cybernetics, that's like saying riding a motorcycle is inherently dehumanizing. Both are mobility aids, both are used to augment the human body to allow it to do things it can't "naturally" do.
Perhaps Genji, Sojourn, and especially Emre might have anxieties that they've become "less human" due to their cybernetics, but the cybernetics themselves aren't causing any sort of psychosis or alterations to their inherent humanity.
But all and all, Overwatch cyborgs and amputees have a pretty good track record of being functional, fulfilled human beings who don't feel any "less human". Sojourn loves what she's able to do with her cybernetics. Genji made peace with and now enjoys the jokes about being a "cyborg ninja". Hazard is having a blast being a full-body cyborg. Emre "suffering from the horrific violation of bodily autonomy by an evil AI implanting itself into him" Sarioğlu is an outlier who skews the results a little negative, I think.
Overall, thanks for this ask! I mean it. It's fun to break down my ideas, hehehe. If you disagree with my opinions, that's no issue at all. Fandom is a space where multiple opinions can exist at once :)
They should release a skin for Emre where his hair is a fucking mess, his cybernetics are scratched to hell, there's dirt smudged everywhere and "T for Teen" Ambiguous Dark Staining on his hands. Call the skin "Vagabond" with a little sentence of flavor text along the lines of "For the past ten years, Emre has been at the mercy of the mysterious presence driving him onward".
Sure, owning said skin would out you immediately as a deranged tumblr girlie (gender neutral) or lorehead, but I just think it would be neat to see Emre as he might be designed if he didn't also have to balance having clean vanilla hero shooter sex appeal.
Emre trying to reassure Freja, saying "don't worry, I'll watch while you sleep to make sure nothing happens." And when her response is "what the hell are you proposing?" he has to backtrack a little. He has to remember that it is Not A Normal Human Experience to constantly wake up in a new location every ~3 days with the absolute certainty that something happened to you after you fell unconscious.
(He. . . he would've given anything to have someone he could trust watching over him at night, for all those years.)
And now he's not sure he can explain what he meant in a way that doesn't either make himself sound creepy or that would make her pity him more than he knows she already does.
