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When did things start to go wrong?
Zarya sat in the dimly lit transport bay, awaiting the ship back to Russia. The scarecrow crew mulled about their stations, talking softly in Spanish, leaving the large solider to brood in solitude.
Had her mission been a success or a failure? She had found the hacker- codename Sombra- after weeks of searching, but what had been revealed to her by the hacker herself about Chairman Volskaya left Zarya in a haze of confused disbelief. At the start of her mission, Zarya would have been quick to scoff off the thought, that Katya was receiving aid from omnics to fight omnics. Yet the seed of doubt had long since been planted- from the very moment Katya had told her what she was doing- even if Zarya had been adamant in stomping it down like a stubborn weed.
Katya should have enlisted the assistance of a spy, a mercenary, or literally anyone else but Zarya. Zarya was a soldier. Point at something and she would destroy it. She had the finesse and subtlety of an elephant hit with a tranquilizer that hadn’t quite kicked fully in yet- finding a hacker in a world-wide blind search was so far out of her comfort zone and skillset that she would need a telescope to see it. And yet she had accepted the mission regardless.
Because Katya called her a friend. Katya trusted her.
Zarya let out a heavy sigh through her nose, her chin dropping so she could run both hands over her hair, elbows on her knees.
Weeks upon weeks she had spent groping around in the dark, no hide nor hair of the hacker to be found. And yet, when she had mentioned her doubts to Katya, the woman merely smiled.
“Giving up so easily?”
Zarya wasn’t one to give up. Giving up was easy. Why try at all if all you were going to do was to decide it was no longer worth it? When she was working towards the championships in weightlifting, there was only two options: gold or nothing. Glory or failure. And on the warfront it was either live or die. Absolutes, no in-betweens. She couldn’t fail her commander, her people, because of a single, infuriating woman. She just needed something more concrete to go off of. She needed help.
And then Katya, out of the blue, decided to point her in the direction of Numbani, because there was, apparently, another hacker who could offer their assistance to help narrow down the search. It seemed… far too convenient, that when Zarya was on the verge of tearing her hair out in frustration, she would get a lead from Katya herself.
But back then, she simply shoved her instinctual feeling aside, stuffing the sprouting seed back into the ground. It had to have been recent news. If Katya had known earlier, Zarya would have known earlier. That had to be the case.
And yet, Katya hadn’t seemed surprised at all when Zarya called her (not frantically, but maybe a little… perturbed) about the hacker assistant which turned out to be an omnic of all things. In fact, it sounded from her tone that she knew, and while she didn’t say out outright, Zarya wasn’t thick in the head enough not to be able to read between the lines.
Lynx-17 was an… odd case, for an omnic. They were sarcastic, knowledgeable, and had just about as much stubbornness as Zarya did when they put their mind to something, like accompanying her to Dorado. She wanted nothing more than to stomp them into the likeness of a sewer grate at first, and yet… Lynx grew on her, like moss in a damp forest, or mold in an insufficiently ventilated bathroom.
Their only solid lead turned into a dead end, suspiciously and inconclusively so, with no blunt reason as to why Lumerico couldn’t assist her search, but Zarya wasn’t going to give up. She knew that this Sombra character had to be here somewhere. All she needed to do was look. And so swallowing down the sapling that was tickling her heart, she had gone door to door, asking. Lynx was looking less and less optimistic by each passing day and with every shake of a head in denial of knowledge, but Zarya was patient and stubborn as a mule, and she would get what she came for. She came this far- she wasn’t going to give up now.
But then they found Sombra’s hideout by way of a Spanish girl who bore the same namesake as Zarya, and everything turned entirely upside down in under five minutes by a smug girl with purple highlights and a flair for dramatics, and Zarya was immediately stricken with the thought that, maybe, she should’ve called it quits a long time ago.
“To be honest, I didn’t think you’d get as far as you did.”
Katya’s words rang hollow in Zarya’s head as she held it in her hands, staring down at her thick armored boots and the slightly dusty floor under them. Katya had lied to her, led her along, and Zarya had been gullible enough to be led along like a loyal mongrel. She had even called Katya a friend, but she had never been such, had she?
After all, friends never lied.
A presence sat down onto the bench beside her, the soft whir of mechanisms almost blaringly loud to her ears in the silent hangar. A familiar set of metallic fingers hesitated for a moment in her view of vision before resting on her arm, the agile wiring and plating warm against her skin.
Zarya closed her eyes, her chin down as she lowered her arms, the one being held resting against her thigh as her other hand reached over and fingers curled around Lynx’s, holding onto them as if they were the only thing rooting her to reality and fearing what would happen if she let go.
Nothing was black and white anymore. There was no good guys (humans) or bad guys (omnics). Katya Volskaya was lying to the entirety of Russia, and Zarya…
Zarya didn’t know who to trust anymore.