Chapter Text
When Mei joins Overwatch, she only means for it to be temporary. This is not to say that she does not support Overwatch—at the time, she believes wholeheartedly in their mission, thinks that they are the best hope of helping save the planet, both from ecological disasters and warfare. However, that does not mean that she has any particular desire to stay among them for long.
In fact, Mei has no particular desire to stay anywhere for long. What she wants is to travel—she loves the planet enough to dedicate her life to saving it, so why would she want to stay in a lab all day? She wants to be in the world, among its wonders, wants to see and to do and to explore. Such is hard accomplish when chained to one job, so it makes sense, then, that she never wants to linger in any one place, at any one job, Overwatch included.
Her thinking is thus: she will work for them for a few years, long enough to be a part of several major publications, and use her resume and improved CV to get independent funding to pursue her own goals, and when she does so, she will travel again. With Overwatch, she travels too, of course, but she does not get to choose where, or how long she stays for, and how much of her work is field work instead of lab work. It is a good opportunity, and she cares for many of her coworkers, but she is not free in the way that she wanted, and that is enough to stop her from wanting to stay.
(Despite this, she dedicates herself to her work wholeheartedly, and does so with a smile on her face. Just because it is not her ideal working situation did not mean that what she does is not worthwhile; she believes in Overwatch, she does, and so she always does what was asked of her, and more than.)
Ecopoint: Antarctica is to be her last assignment. Eighteen months in one place is not a prospect she relishes, but she cares a good deal for the people with whom she will serve on a team and, more importantly, has only this left to do before she can leave. In order to pass the time more quickly, to chart her progress and give herself hope, she vlogs. Once per week, she broadcasts to the world her adventures at the Ecopoint, and content herself with the fact that she is 1.3% closer to a new chapter in her life.
She only makes it three weeks in.
3.8%.
3.8% is three weeks, but it is also ten years.
Twelve years ago, in 2066, Mei was 31, and ten years later, in 2076, she was 31 still; now in 2078 she is 33, but those two years come ten years too late.
She struggled coming back, and struggles still. Always, it is she who leaves, she who dictates how long she is away, she who changes while the rest of her family stays more or less the same, so to return to her parents gone frail, her nieces and nephew grown, her family having moved on and buried her—it is a shock to them all.
Even if she wanted to stay, she could not; her home is no longer her own, they have all grown, and changed, and there is no time capsule waiting for her there, it is she who is a walking memory. So she leaves, she travels, she blogs, and her adventures, her work—it is what she always wanted. She is free, she is free, she is free.
But at what cost?
Now, she has the funding she wanted, has the platform for her advocacy, has the whole of the planet open for her, ready to be explored. This is what she always wanted—but she is alone, totally and unfathomably so. When she stepped out of the Ecopoint and into the winter sun, the snow and ice seemed vast, endless, inescapable, everything around her blindingly white, and she thought she was happy, to be free of the dark, to be free of the tightness of the cryochamber, but she was not, is not.
On bad days, she feels like she is still stuck in that moment. Around her, infinite space, but what fills it? Where ought she go? She is lost, and the world is emptier than she could have imagined.
Perhaps it is no surprise that she makes her way back to Overwatch after all.
When she rejoins them, again she does not mean to stay. In fact, she does not really want to rejoin them at all, but she wants to do what is best for the world, and she wants to have answers and she wants, maybe above everything, to be somewhere familiar once again.
(Of course, she is unwilling to admit that last point to herself so openly. Instead she thinks it would be nice to see old friends, and knows that, despite her circumstances, they will not treat her so differently from everyone else. After all, they are just as strange as she.)
What answers she seeks are not forthcoming. None of those who answer Winston’s Recall were involved, in any way, with the decision to abandon the Ecopoint, and although the files must exist, somewhere, which detail that decision, must be buried among everything else, Mei cannot begin to guess where to search for them. All the documents she finds are encrypted, or redacted, or otherwise incomplete, and she knows that, with time, she might be able to piece things together but—well, it will take time.
So she stays.
It helps that she is not the only one among them who has not changed. Time may have forgotten Mei, but it holds little meaning to Lena at all, and although Angela has aged, she is so thoroughly resistant to change that she is hardly different than the woman Mei once knew, still claims to be working her way through the same novel, when asked if she ever reads anything besides scientific publications.
With them, with Reinhardt, with Winston, with other people the world abandoned, Mei feels less lonely, and with Satya, who is new among them, Mei learns an entirely different sort of belonging.
(Mei has, of course, been in relationships before, and even long-term ones, but none like this. None with routine, with familiarity, with the weight of expectation. Always, she knew that if she wanted to, she could cut and run; it is not so with Satya, whose needs Mei respects enough to know better than to not give her time to adjust to an uncoupling. She tries not to dwell on it; for now, she has a reason to stay.)
Perhaps, then, it does not matter that she cannot get her answers. With the Recall, she has more freedom than ever she did in Overwatch proper, to travel and to research what she likes, and she tells herself that not only could she decide to leave any day, but she will, once she finally uncovers the truth of what was done to Ecopoint: Antarctica, why she and her expedition mates were left to die.
Months pass, and she grows closer to Satya, to all of them, in truth, as she uncovers half answer after half answer. It is dangerous, she knows, to let anyone become so attached to her, is going to be complicated, be messy when she leaves, but how can she not? How can she know what it is to work with Satya, to dance with her, to lie with her, and not allow herself to fall in love?
It is a problem. It is a problem when they only work together in the lab, is more of one when first they kiss, and is even more so when she realizes that they have, both of them, fallen in love.
(When Mei loves, she wants, more than anything, to protect that person, to spare them harm, to ensure that, even if she cannot fix everything, she has tried to. Leaving a person whom she loves, who loves her, to whom routine matters—can she do it? With her other lovers, things were not the same, because they were both of them filled with wanderlust, unable and unwilling to be tied down. Satya is not the same, cannot be treated the same, and more troubling, Mei does not want to treat her the same way, necessarily, has trouble already when attempting to envision a life without Satya in it.)
If only Mei had answers, then she could leave, could flee now while she has the chance, before she and Satya become more enmeshed, and at least lessen the damage of so doing.
For Mei will leave, one day. She knows it. Even if Overwatch is not so temporary a home as she thought it would be, Mei’s heart does not belong to the organization, or to one woman, but to the world—all of it—and so she cannot ever allow herself to be claimed by one place.
This she tells herself, and this is true.
But if that is so, why is it, when Jack Morrison reveals himself to the Recall again, does she not leave? She has her answers—or she could have them, if she knew how to ask those questions, if she knew what it was she wanted from him, if she were not so afraid that, having heard what he has to say, she will not know what to do with the knowledge she has gained. If she wanted to, she could know, and could be once again free.
Instead, she does not ask, fears what would happen if she did. Where would she go next? What if the answers brought her no peace? How could she tell Satya that she is leaving, now, and may never return?
All of these things keep her up at night, but the final question more than the others. For what does Jack’s reasoning actually matter? The results are the same—a senseless loss of life. Whether he chose to abandon them because he deemed the risk to others too great, because he assumed they were dead already, or because of bureaucracy, it changes nothing.
(And after Ana reveals herself, too, another Captain Amari once again among them, Mei begins to wonder if she has the right to demand an answer. After all, he left Ana, his best friend and right hand woman, so why should Mei, further afield and further down his list of priorities, have faired any better? Clearly, recovery was none of his concern, by that time.)
Maybe that is just an excuse; the longer her questions go unanswered, the longer she has a reason to stay. Or, at least a reason not to leave.
And she is free here, really, the Recall is not so centralized that she cannot leave, when she wants, to go to restore another of the old Ecopoints, or to study some natural disaster or manmade catastrophe. In fact, none of the others really know enough about climatology to stop her, to even guess at whether or not she could just as well be doing her work in the lab.
If all she longed for is freedom—well, she has it. So why then does she feel trapped, sometimes? Why when she could leave any day?
To say that Mei feels at all trapped by Satya would be completely inaccurate. Never has her relationship with Satya put her in a position in which she does not want to be, and her girlfriend—lover? partner?—does not seek to change her, or to influence her behaviors in any way. Satya loves her as she is, and would not make Mei stay, would not even think to try.
As they are, they are happy, and nothing about their relationship troubles Mei, it is simply the nebulous promise of tomorrow.
What happens if, when tomorrow comes, it is the day she decides to leave?
To leave without warning would surely be unacceptable. How could she do that to Satya?
To stay would be equally intolerable. How could she do that to herself?
It is a worry she cannot solve, or even determine the origin of, for the better part of another year. How could she, when she is examining the problem at the wrong scale?
What Mei thinks is a problem with herself, or her relationship with Satya, is, in fact, a fear of something else entirely, of what commitment means at a societal level.
This she realizes when Angela proposes to Fareeha.
She ought to be happy for the couple—and, on some level, she is, because they are her friends, and this makes them happy, and they deserve to find the stability and constant love that the two of them have been searching for for a very long time—but she is filled with dread. What if Satya expects this of her? What will Mei do then?
For Mei, marriage has never been a desirable end goal; once, she might have tolerated it, so long as her spouse would have allowed her to live as she pleased, to come and go when it suited her, but now? After her experience with cryostasis, Mei cannot imagine ever marrying anyone. It was bad enough to return to her family, and find them so changed—but a spouse?
(Logically, she knows that it could not happen again, that she will never again be in a cryostasis pod, has no reason to be—but emotionally? It is not so simple, and the thought of marriage, of commitment, of forever? That terrifies her.)
No, Mei does not want to be married at all, but she worries about what that might seem, to Satya, to indicate, worries that other people, too, will see that they remain unwed, uncommitted—formally, at least—and think that their love is lesser. Mei loves Satya, adores her, has stayed with Overwatch this long in part because of her, but she does not want to marry her.
Should that be a problem?
Ideally, no.
Might it be?
Certainly. Neither they nor their relationship is immune to scrutiny, to the pressures of society. Just because she does not think something should be an issue will not prevent it being so, and just because Satya might agree, rationally, that their marital status holds no bearing on the legitimacy of their feelings for one another does not mean that she will necessarily feel that way.
But, still, Mei does not want to be married. So what is she to do?
While discussing the matter with Satya is an option, and probably the best one, Mei puts it off, gives herself more time to consider the problem. The last thing she wants is to begin a conversation that she is unprepared to finish, to try and explain what she is feeling when she has not the words, and thereby give the wrong impression.
Because she loves Satya, Mei is afraid to tell her that she does not want marriage, nor any sort of formal commitment. Because she loves Satya, Mei is afraid of losing her.
That is the crux of it—Mei knows that she wants Satya to continue to be in her life, now and in the foreseeable future, so should she not also wish to marry her? Should she not also desire some legal connection, some public declaration of those feelings? Would it not make that future more secure?
Perhaps, but it is binding, and that, Mei does not like. To be tethered is anathema to her.
How to say it to Satya, though, in a way that does not sound cruel, I’m afraid you’ll tie me down, or paint a picture of a future too uncertain I want to be able to leave at any time? Surely Satya, who values order, routine, and repetition, would value, too, a guarantee, a promise of the future Mei cannot provide.
It is a conversation that must be carefully crafted, carefully planned, carefully staged; there is no room for error in communicating such a thing, not if Mei wants to avoid hurting Satya inadvertently or even losing her entirely.
Naturally, Mei’s nervousness gets the better of her, and one morning, in their shared workspace, she finds herself inadvertently blurting it out after Satya mentions that they ought to consider babyproofing parts of the Watchpoint, as she knows Fareeha wants children and considers the arrival of one to be only a matter of time.
“I don’t want to get married,” says she, with no preamble or qualifying statements, as if it were that simple.
“I understand,” Satya says, tone even, as if she were completely unruffled by this.
“I just think—. You do?” It takes a moment for her to process what her partner has told her. Satya understands? How can she, when she has yet to hear Mei’s reasoning.
“I do,” confirms Satya, not so much as looking up from the turret she is modifying, “I have no desire to be wed to you, either.”
“Oh,” says Mei, and then, “Good,” and the matter is summarily dropped.
That ought to be enough, ought to be the end of things, because it was, after all, what Mei wanted, was it not? Satya is not hurt, is not angry, does not feel slighted by Mei’s desire to remain unwed, does not think that because society says they ought to be married, then they should do so. Ostensibly, this is the best possible outcome.
Why, then, does Mei feel so hurt?
Although she does not want to marry Satya—or at all—and she longs for freedom, knowing that she has it because Satya has no desire to wed to her feels, somehow, like an insult, like she is not good enough to meet Satya’s standards, like she is not worthy of marrying.
That cannot be the case, however, because Satya loves her. Satya loves her, and she wants for the two of them to stay together for the foreseeable future, for what they have is stable, is mutually beneficial, is a relationship that they are both happy to be in. Satya loves her, and she loves Satya, and that is all they have ever needed. Satya loves her, and she knows that.
Right?