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Olivia felt cold.
She wasn’t doing anything different. She was working, camped out in front of a series of monitors, lights low. She had spent the last three hours gaining access to some files that she really shouldn’t have access too, and now she was digging through them. Usually the heat radiating from her computer tower and the servers nearby kept her warm.
She was even wearing comfortable clothing; leggings and a sweatshirt. Yeah, her feet were bare and the collar of her shirt offered up her shoulder, but she was covered enough that she should be plenty warm. Except, she wasn’t?
She felt the cold stinging her face and turning her fingers numb. Every breath she took felt sharp, like she was breathing in ice. She was from Mexico, it hadn’t snowed there in a century. The only time she had ever felt something like this was in Volskaya, paying playful visits to her friend Katya.
Cold so bitter it was hard to breathe.
Olivia got up from her seat and wandered into her bedroom. She tugged the comforter off the bed, dragging it back with her. She sat back down, wrapped up tight. She buried her face in her blankets for a moment, frowning when she realized the blanket didn’t help at all and she was still cold...
So, Overwatch was back.
Olivia had known this for a while because she knew all kinds of things no one else knew. It wasn’t official or anything. Just a few old soldiers and rogues gathering in abandoned Watchpoints, trying to put broken pieces back together.
Except now, it was starting to feel official. Null sector had launched an attack on the streets of Paris and the whole gang had come sweeping in. Winston, the monkey. Lena Oxton; Tracer. Angela Ziegler; Mercy. Reinhardt Wilhelm and Brigitte Lindholm. Genji Shimada. Echo, an Omnic. Mei-Ling Zhou. She knew them all. Not personally, of course, but she she had plenty of information about them.
There was news footage of the Paris attack playing on a loop on one of her monitors. She watched the same section of footage again and again over the rim of her coffee mug. The video quality wasn’t great, but she could clearly see Mei taking a hard hit from a big, ugly omnic.
Olivia didn’t need to see it because she could feel it. She could feel it like she had been there. She could feel the ache in her own body like it was her who got knocked to hell. It was distant. Delayed. Like the pain was just waking up after a long sleep, but it was definitely there.
Distracted, she took another sip of coffee only to find her mug empty. Hm. When had that happened? Olivia abandoned the mug by two other empty ones, coffee rings staining the bottoming of all three. She went to the nearest monitor, a touch screen, and pulled up her file on Mei-Ling Zhou.
Then, as an afterthought, an internet search for soulmate bonds.
Mei-Ling Zhou was a climatologist like none other, known first and foremost for her innovative inventions; climate-manipulating devices that could restore the melting polar ice caps, fix holes in the ozone layers, and provide protection to at-risk areas suffering from climate change the most.
Olivia looked into these inventions. She looked into their practical uses and how they were used day-to-day. She had no problem admitting that she didn’t get how they worked. She was smart, but unless she spent the next decade studying this stuff, she wasn’t going to be able to understand it.
That wasn’t the only thing Mei was known for, though. Oh no.
Mei-Ling Zhou was pronounced missing, assumed dead. The last traces of her existence were at Overwatch’s Ecopoint: Antarctica. An elite research team that she was a part of had been caught in a Polar storm. It ripped through the Ecopoint and left them stranded.
Olivia found the lost data logs. They weren’t necessarily hidden. It was just that no one really cared to look. She found videos; recordings of Mei sweetly talking to the camera about the dwindling supplies and dire conditions. Smiling despite the circumstances. Stroking Snowball’s helm. Hoping for the best.
Olivia found the cryo-chambers' status monitoring reports. How they struggled for years, battered by subsequent storms that cut through the area. How they failed, one by one. How Mei’s was the only unit left standing. How it released her from stasis decades later to dead colleagues and no rescue coming.
Olivia searched long and hard to find what happened in between Mei’s miracle, surviving the cryostasis that killed her teammates, and the attack on Paris. There were no news reports of a rescue mission to Antarctica. There was no movement on any of Mei’s old credit cards. No one flashed her ID or passport at any airport anywhere in the world.
There were a few CCTV shots of her in Xi’an and one of her in Gibraltar, but that was it. Where had she gone? What was she doing?
Olivia wasn’t about to let her go missing again.
Olivia found her.
She had a flag set for Mei’s face. If she showed up anywhere, on any security feed or traffic cam from Oasis to Rialto, Olivia would get a notification. The program had been running in the corner of her screen for a week now. She kept glancing at it while she worked on other things, waiting, expecting it to chirp at her.
Then suddenly, it happened. Olivia was sitting cross-legged in bed, reading the unredacted version of a few particularly interesting documents on her phone. Sometimes it helped to break up which screen she was staring when she stared at screens for hours on end. She had heard a trilling beep coming from her computer and for a few seconds there she had no clue what could possibly be making that noise.
It hit her all at once and she went hurrying into the next room, pulling up the flagged media. She was expecting security surveillance at a store somewhere, or a hotel lobby maybe. It was ...a live stream?
It took Olivia a few minutes to understand what was happening. It just looked messy. A crowd. A concert? No, a march. A protest march. People were walking down a city street somewhere, holding signs, shouting. The location marker told her it was New York and the chanting told her this was climate related.
The United States was the absolute last country to embrace clean energy, and many companies based there were doing the absolute bare minimum. It wasn’t a surprise to find people up in arms, marching for a change. It was a surprise to find Mei among them. She was short but she had such a presence, she looked ten feet tall. She was chanting, screaming loudly, so engaged it was riling up others.
Things were getting... violent, it looked like. The live streamer had whipped out their phone to capture the unrest. There were police in riot gear clashing with the protesters. Someone was going to get hurt.
All at once Olivia felt a burst of pain in her jaw. Then the pain hit her all over. Her face, her arm, her back. The stream, on a slight delay, had a perfect shot of Mei getting hit in the face with a police baton. She was tackled to the ground, arm twisted behind her back, knee in her spine to keep her pinned.
Olivia didn’t have any doubt in soul bonds after that.
It was four hours from her place to New York by plane. It helped that Olivia had strings she could pull and that there were people who owed her a favor or two. She was in New York City five hours later with cash money for bail bonds. The arrested protesters were taken to different precincts so it took her a couple tries to find the right police station.
Mei was released from her holding cell, free to go. She was clearly confused as to who paid her bail but not particularly willing to question it. Rubbing her wrists where the cuffs had been, she started towards the door. She stopped when she saw Olivia standing there, waiting for her.
There were a few long seconds where they just stood and stared at each other. Mei was so much more beautiful in person than any of the picture or videos. She opened her mouth, likely to ask if Olivia was the one who paid her bail, but she seemed to think better of it. She looked Olivia up and down, eyes lingering on the close shaved hair on the side of her head and the cybernetics planted there.
“Hurts.” Mei raised a hand, tapping the side of her own head. “I thought it was a side-effect from the cryostasis. I guess not.”
Yeah. Olivia had gotten used to it over the years. She’d come to tolerate it. She could almost forget about it.
It did hurt though...