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Before she was Widowmaker, Amélie Lacroix was a terrified little girl.
After she joined Overwatch, people asked her a lot of questions: what it felt like to kill without feeling, what Talon was like, if she regretted any of it, if she ever just wanted to kill herself.
Nobody ever asks about this. Nobody can ever know.
(Some days, the answer to the last question is a resounding yes.)
*
She was a good kid.
“What does that mean,” the judge says. She’s a tall, willowy woman, oddly personable. Widow doesn’t trust her. Of course. But she maybe doesn’t hate her too much.
“Straight As,” drawls Widow. “Fluent in seven languages by the age of 10. Perfect grades. Perfectly dressed. Everybody loved me.” A good kid.
“You sound resentful.”
“Maybe,” says Widow, and leaves it at that.
*
Talon was blackness, a hole in her soul where something else was meant to be. Overwatch is kind of the same, except she has Angela Ziegler.
“These trials are ridiculous,” Mercy says, a little warily.
“Ah, are they?” Widow laughs. “Do I not deserve to be persecuted. For all that I have done.”
“You’re part of Overwatch now. They can’t put you in jail.”
“They can try.”
*
“What does my childhood have to do with this, exactly.”
“I want to know about you, Widow.” The judge’s name is Fiona. “I want to know why you did what you did.”
“I was brainwashed.”
“No,” the judge says. Widow can’t think of a woman like this as Fiona. “Not why you did the bad things. Why you did the good things.”
Widow pauses. The room is silent. The hearing is fairly private. No reporters, some Overwatch personnel and Mercy. Widow doesn’t understand why Mercy comes here every day, when she probably has much more important things to do.
“On July 19th, the woman known as Widowmaker broke into a bank in Manhattan to kill a high profile target, the CEO of a big corporation,” the judge recounts. “She stole important information, but spared his life, despite her orders. Why?” Widow doesn’t answer. “Because he had a daughter, and the daughter was there.”
“I’m not a monster,” spits Widowmaker.
“You weren’t taking the life of a child. Just her father. But you spared him, for her. Why?”
Widow grits her teeth. Swallows. Takes a deep breath.
“Why, Amélie?”
*
A good kid. But a terrified little girl.
She remembers the first time she came home to the house to her mother, furious from a bad day at work. She was sat at the table, drinking a glass of orange juice. That’s the worst part. Amélie's mother wasn’t an alcoholic.
She just did things because she was mad.
Her mother said, “You’ll have to make your own fucking dinner. What’s your excuse for being home so late?”
“You didn’t pick me up, Mom. I had to walk home.” Her hair was soaked from the rain.
“Of course it’s all my fault, isn’t it? As usual.” Her mother laughs. “Always my fucking fault.” She throws the glass. It smashes the wall by Amélie's head, and Amélie sobs.
A good kid.
*
She doesn’t particularly like Mercy’s company. Not really. She just puts up with it, really. It’s just better than the rest of them.
Except that’s not true.
Because as Widow’s court progresses, as her time with Overwatch progresses, by days and then weeks and then months, they grow to include her. And she doesn’t encourage it. She tries to rip herself away from them at any instance.
It doesn’t work.
Soon, she finds Lucio joining her on her morning jogs, and he chats when she wants it and is silent when she doesn’t, and somehow always knows the difference. She teaches Reinhardt some ballet moves, and he tells her how he learnt to ballroom dance (about a woman named Ana, who is dead, dead, dead and Reinhardt doesn’t cry, but somehow this is worse).
But Mercy. Mercy is the constant. Mercy is there when she goes for breakfast, when she heads back to her room, when she trains; she’s there to patch Widow up when she’s injured.
“Do you still dream about it?” Mercy asks one day, over a game of chess.
Widow moves a piece on the board. “About Talon? Of course.”
“No. About her.”
Widow’s throat closes up. She hunches over the board.
“I’m sorry,” Mercy says eventually. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I do,” Widow says, quiet.
“It’s okay. It’s understandable. It’s called PTSD, you know.”
“I suffered through so much at the hands of Talon –”
“It doesn’t negate your other pain,” says Mercy, and that’s that.
*
Amélie is happy at home, really. Her father is dead and her mother sometimes looks like she wants to kill her, but she’s happy. Her friends come around all the time and tell her how lovely her mother is, so how bad can it be?
“You’re too harsh about your mother,” they tell her. “She’s so nice.”
Amélie is sixteen now, and she thinks of the TV shows, the books, where the kid is abused but doesn’t believe it herself, and everybody else knows it and can’t save her, and thinks maybe sometimes it’s the other way around. Begins to think she’s making it all up. Begins to think she’s not worth listening to.
On her eighteenth birthday, Amélie gets straight As on her exams and her mother breaks her arm.
Amélie doesn’t go to the hospital. Gets her friend who’s studying to be a doctor to fix it. The friend fucks it up pretty bad.
The arm still bothers Widow sometimes, especially when it’s cold. She likes it, in a way, because it means she really was that little girl once.
*
She’s just a kid.
(Then she isn’t, she meets her husband, learns to fight, gets kidnapped, and proceeds to kill him.)
But she’s just a kid.
*
“People can be pretty fucked up,” Mercy says, and her shirt bares her midriff when she stretches. “That’s okay.”
Widow laughs. “You’re an optimist. It must be nice not to want to kill yourself for what you’ve done, cherie.”
“Who says I don’t?” Mercy shrugs. “Like I said, people can be pretty fucked up.”
“You would not hurt a fly.”
“No,” says Mercy, “I’d hurt a lot worse.”
*
The verdict is that she gets to remain in Overwatch, but she’ll be closely watched. And Widow thinks she and the judge might have an understanding by this point – that Widow’s a terrible, terrible person, but she’s trying to be good so hard.
“My concern,” says Fiona, later, when nobody else is listening, “is what might happen if you lose the doctor.”
*
It’s the end of their first mission of winter, and it hadn’t been pretty. Widow is bruised and bloody, and when Mercy sees her limping out of the helicopter, Widow is a little worried Mercy might actually finish the job.
Instead, she kisses her.
The kiss isn’t pretty either. Mercy hangs onto her with her fingers threaded through Widow’s hair. Widow doesn’t care. Can’t bring herself to.
*
“You need not worry about that,” says Widow, and Fiona raises an eyebrow. “I’d die before I lost her. And I’d die if I couldn’t save her.”
Fiona is silent, and Widow just smiles, but there’s no kindness to it. She walks away without saying goodbye.
“I wonder what you’d do if you met her again,” Fiona calls out. “Your mother.”
“You needn’t wonder,” says Widow. “I shot her in the head.”
*
There's a war raging on, but sometimes there is this, something a little like love, Mercy's smile in her sleep when Widow kisses her forehead, a hand gripping hers.
Maybe it's enough.