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"And that makes it eight to zero!"
"Aw come on!"
Lena stifled a chuckle at Lúcio's genuine anger at being the eighth person to lose to Hana in a row.
What had started off as a friendly 'Boys Vs Girls' gaming tournament in the Watchpoint's common room had very soon turned into an 'Everyone Vs Hana' tournament. So far, Hana had beaten Cole, Genji, Brigitte, Angela, Lena herself, Mei, Winston, and now Lúcio.
"Now you know how it feels," Genji grumbled from the side. He'd been very confident when claiming earlier that he would beat her easily, only to lose so early in the competition. To his credit though, he had been the closest to victory.
"Aww, don't feel sad," Hana teased, stretching her fingers. "At least you losers have a support group!"
"Looks like we're running out of people to pit against ya," Cole said with a laugh.
"I still think you should let me have a try, Hana," Reinhardt perked up from his large armchair.
Hana scoffed. "No way, old man! I am not letting your giant sausage fingers anywhere near my controllers."
Lena couldn't stifle her giggle this time when she saw Reinhardt pout. He'd been trying to have a turn since the very start of the competition.
"You even let Winston have a go!" he argued.
"No offense, but even Winston has better hand-eye coordination than you."
At the mention of his name, Winston looked up from his book and shrugged sheepishly.
"You gonna let her get away with that?" said Brigitte, clearly enjoying the friendly banter.
"No, she's right," Reinhardt said with a sigh. "I would probably break the controller again."
"Probably for the best," Lena spoke up, wanting to join in. She remembered when Reinhardt had broken one of the gamer's controllers in the first place and had attempted to hide it so that she'd never notice. Hana had noticed immediately, of course, and had gone on a rampage trying to figure out who the culprit was. Reinhardt, who was a terrible liar, had been sussed out very quickly.
"Well, speaking of giants, what about gravity man?" Cole suggested, nodding over at where Dr. de Kuiper was sitting on an old wooden chair near the edge of the large, couch-filled room. He was looking off to the side and, as expected, did not react to his name being mentioned.
Hana's eyes widened. "Great idea! I've never played against him before so I'll go easy on him."
"Hey, no- that ain't fair!" Lúcio groaned.
"Wait to see if he wants to first," Lena chastised. "I'll go over and ask him."
Reinhardt scowled. "But his hands are the same size as mine! This really isn't fair, Hana!"
Reinhardt kept bickering even as Lena walked over to the corner of the room claimed by the newly rescued Dr. de Kuiper, who was still looking off to the side and didn't seem to have been keeping up with the conversation in the room. She didn't zip there, not wanting to spook him.
“Heya, fancy joining in for a round?”
Dr. de Kuiper didn't answer. He continued to stare off into space, which wasn't an unusual occurrence, but Lena did notice that it didn't have any of the humming or finger-tapping that normally seemed to accompany his thoughts.
“You alright there, doc? You seem quieter than usual.”
The rest of the room had resumed its chatter and Siebren still didn't acknowledge her presence. She moved a little closer and waved.
The sudden movement seemed to grab his attention.
“Hmm? Oh!" Upon seeing and recognising her, he adjusted himself in his seat to better face her. "Sorry, were you saying something?”
Today he lacked the apologetic smile that he'd usually give after being snapped out of his thoughts.
“Just asking if you fancied a game against Hana. We need someone to beat her." Or, at the very least, some more kindling for the unbridled flame that was Hana Song.
His face was blank for another second as it looked like he processed the information.
"Oh, erm… no thank you, if that's alright. Not today."
"No worries!" While it was clear that he was trying to dismiss her, Lena couldn't help but feel like his behaviour was different than normal.
Though it had only been nearly two months since they'd rescued Dr. Siebren de Kuiper from Talon, Lena was pretty sure she'd picked up on a lot of his little habits and quirks. After all, she'd been keeping an extra eye on him not just to be wary of his power, but also because she knew what it was like to be a product of experimental failure. People had a tendency to (even unknowingly) struggle to separate the human being from the science.
So she'd come to know Siebren as a lovely individual. He preferred tea over coffee and waited until it was fairly cold before drinking it. He didn't like wearing shoes or socks and his preferred method of movement was floating (he compromised with Overwatch to wear cozy slippers most of the time). He was a big fan of music and, though he had his own tastes, he was always willing to listen to any recommendations given by the team. He was kind and quiet to most people but to those he felt more comfortable around (namely Winston and Angela) he would talk animatedly for hours.
He was also troubled in ways that just taking him away from Talon couldn't fix.
He'd spent the first week or so at the base cooped up in the room they'd given him, often forgetting to eat. When he did occasionally emerge, his face would be pale and his wrinkles pronounced with dark, sunken circles under his eyes.
Angela didn't specify why, but she started forcing the old scientist to spend a number of hours of the day in the common room. She'd also pulled Lena aside and instructed her to make sure he was joining in and not left alone for too long.
Even though he'd seemed to have set up camp over on the one remaining wooden chair (he'd been offered a proper armchair many times and always refused in favour of the wooden one), Lena always made sure to go over and check in on him every now and again. Sometimes it would be more difficult to snap him out of it, but every time he would apologise with a smile and made more of an effort to engage with what was going on around him.
So to see a frown etched on his face and the way he immediately turned back to the side to return to his thoughts sparked her concern.
"Dr. de Kuiper?" she repeated, waving again and making him jump. Had he gotten swept up in his own thoughts so quickly?
He seemed to pick up on her worry and gave a little smile, albeit slightly forced. “My apologies, my thoughts were… elsewhere.”
“That's okay," Lena comforted, watching as the frown gradually returned. "Are you alright? You seem a little more out of it than usual."
He'd actually seemed a little off for a whole week, but Lena hadn't wanted to press.
“Oh, it’s nothing to be concerned about." His smile dropped completely as he realised that he'd failed to hide his troubles. "I’m just thinking of a time long since passed.”
So maybe it wasn't his normal zoning out?
Lena fought the urge to give him a reassuring pat on the back. Angela had warned him that it might take a little time until he would be okay with unprompted physical contact. Lena hoped it would be soon.
“Well, all I’m saying is that I'm somewhat of an expert on time myself if you wanted to talk about it, and if it’s wearing you down you might as well get it off your chest, right?”
He chuckled gently and Lena was inwardly punching the air at her little victory.
“Ha, I… suppose you’re right.”
She couldn't help but be a little surprised as he took up her offer.
She was about to ask a question when an loud bellow echoed around the room, catching both of their attention.
Quickly glancing over near the TV, Lena saw an angry Torbjörn and an even angrier Hana standing over a broken controller.
"See?! It has nothing to do with hand size!" Reinhardt shouted, the only one to have something to smile about in the admittedly humorous situation.
She turned back to Dr. de Kuiper.
“Do you want to move somewhere a tad quieter?”
He smiled appreciatively. “...If you wouldn’t mind.”
She led him into the kitchen, which was adjacent to the common room and also had a small table with six chairs around it. As she left with Siebren floating behind her, she noticed Angela giving her a questioning look. She responded with a smile and received an approving nod in return.
Once the scientist was comfortably situated in his seat, Lena set about getting him a glass of water. He accepted it gratefully.
"Thank you, Ms Oxton."
"Please doc, call me Lena. Or even Tracer, if you want. Ms Oxton feels way too formal for the likes of me," she corrected as she sat down opposite him with her own glass of orange juice.
"My apologies."
"It's okay, it's no big deal."
She watched as Dr. de Kuiper took a sip of his water, looking off to the side again. He'd probably forgotten why she'd brought him here.
"So… we were going to talk about something?" she prompted delicately.
He turned to face her again, the frown from earlier returning. "I know, I'm just… trying to find the best way to explain it."
Oh, maybe not then. She quietly waited for him to continue.
He wasn't meeting her eyes, instead he looked down into his glass of water and admired the ripples created by gentle movement.
"It's just… today's date," he began eventually.
"The twenty-second of July?" Lena asked, confused.
Siebren nodded solemnly and fidgeted with the glass in his hands.
"Today would have been… was the day of my experiment."
"Oh." Was all Lena could say. His recent change in behaviour suddenly made a lot more sense. "It must be bringing you down, with it being so many years since your accident."
Siebren shook his head softly.
"No, that's not it." He put down the glass and looked up at her. "I know my mind isn't what it was, but that date meant so much to me that I haven't been able to forget it. It's etched into my psyche. I spent a lot of time in the past looking forward to it, and it felt like my life's work depended on it."
Lena stayed quiet, not wanting to interrupt him as he opened up to her for the first time.
"There was a time where I even- ha, where I used to fantasise that this day would go down in history as the day one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs was achieved. A fact that I knew would never happen, of course, but I was so excited." He turned away again. "It… hurts, that nothing came of it."
"Well, I wouldn't say nothing came from it," Lena said. "You still managed to make a black hole, right?" That was what he'd been trying to do, wasn't it? "Whatever happened afterwards, you still did what nobody had done before. And you got some pretty cool powers out of it!"
"Mmm," he verbally agreed, though the sadness stayed on his face. "Still not quite the desired outcome, however."
Lena understood the feeling, a lot more than Dr. de Kuiper probably knew.
"Yeah… I get that."
Siebren looked up, surprised. "You do?"
"Yeah," she affirmed. "I was really excited to get to test pilot the Slipstream."
He raised an eyebrow.
"That was the name of the plane," she explained, pointing towards the piece of machinery attached to her torso so he knew what she was talking about. "It was a massive deal- can you imagine? A teleporting fighter jet!"
Siebren gave her a knowing, wistful smile. "I can't, and I suppose that's because things didn't go as planned."
Now Lena was the one to look away. "Yeah. The technology wasn't mine, I was just the pilot, but it still felt like it was going to be the biggest moment of my life until… yeah. Things went wrong and I lost myself."
"And you were so young, too." Siebren remarked sadly.
"It's alright," she reassured, although she did shiver involuntarily at the memory of the time she spent unanchored in time. "It only took a few months in the strange time void before I was rescued."
Siebren's jaw fell open slightly.
"At the time it felt like forever," she continued anyway. "But the more time passes, the more I feel really thankful that it was only that, y'know? It could have been a lot longer, or they could never have found me, or left me for dead. It took time but I'm more stable than I've ever been. And I basically have superpowers!"
"A few months?!" Siebren said incredulously, staring at her with wide eyes- as if she was something highly volatile or delicate. "And you remember what happened? How do you manage it? I don't know how long I was exposed, and I don't remember much, and look at what's become of me!"
"Well, I don't think it was exactly the same, it wasn't a black hole or anything. But it definitely felt like some sort of void," Lena replied, trying not to look too shocked at how this was the first time the astrophysicist had opened up about his accident to anyone.
Siebren ignored her and leaned in conspiratorially.
"C-Can you hear that music?"
She wasn't sure what to say. On one hand, she was pretty sure she couldn't, and she'd been briefed by Angela that whatever melody Dr. de Kuiper claimed to hear was purely a figment of his imagination; a product of his broken mind.
On the other hand, as a pilot, she'd always been good at tuning out background noise.
She looked up at Siebren. He was leaning towards her expectantly, a glimmer of what almost looked like hope shimmering in his tired eyes.
"I can't say for sure," she answered truthfully, watching as the man's shoulders sagged. "I don't hear anything in my day-to-day business, but… back in the void, there were loads of overlapping sounds. Some of them were voices of people from different times, but there were other sounds that I've got no idea how to describe. And I didn't really think about it at the time, but now that you mention it… the way they overlapped did kind of sound like music, yeah."
The memory started to get overwhelming. Neverending flashes of places, faces, shapes and colours that her brain struggled to comprehend. Not knowing when or where she was, constantly trying to claw her way to the window of time that looked most like her own, trying to find Winston at the right point of his life, and then, once there, trying to interact and get someone to notice her before she was pulled back into the storm of nothing and everything.
And the overwhelming despair she'd felt. Losing hope (and part of herself with it).
Up until now, whenever she was asked about her experience, she'd made an effort to underplay her feelings. She was fine now, that's all that mattered.
Yet when sitting across from a man who had been through the same sort of thing, who could understand what it was like without providing empty reassurance or false empathy, she couldn't stop her eyes from welling up with tears.
Determined not to stray from her initial goal of this conversation, she blinked rapidly and cleared her throat.
"So you said you don't remember?"
Siebren had politely averted his gaze as she cried, but when he turned back to address her his expression was full of a sense of knowing that Lena had never seen on him before.
He cleared his throat too, more awkwardly.
"It's… complicated," he answered. Not to avoid talking about it, she realised, but because it did seem to genuinely be a complicated situation for him.
She was right, because after sucking in a deep breath, he continued.
"After hearing about your experience, I think it's a mercy that I struggle to remember exactly what happened to me." He paused with a frown. "No, actually, I think I do sometimes recall bits and pieces, but… the memories don't stay for very long."
Lena nodded in understanding. She felt that way sometimes too.
"However, while I don't remember what I saw, I do remember how I felt."
"How did you feel?" Lena asked in-between sips of orange juice, as if they were two friends chatting over coffee rather than two individuals traumatised by the mechanisms of the universe.
For a moment she wondered whether she'd regret asking.
Siebren looked surprised that she'd asked.
"...Afraid," he answered after a few seconds of deliberation. It seemed like he was making a conscious effort to match Lena's casual tone, but his voice (and hands) shook slightly nonetheless.
"Afraid, overwhelmed, er… loud. I know that isn't a feeling but I do remember thinking it at the time. I can't remember what I heard, but it was so, so loud. T-Too loud."
He became more agitated as he spoke, and if Angela was in here she would have told Lena off for getting him worked up and would have tried to calm him down.
But Angela wasn't in here, and Lena was enthralled by what Dr. de Kuiper was saying, believing and hanging onto every single word. She knew he wasn't exaggerating or speaking nonsense.
He looked down at his hands.
"I-It felt like the sound filled the space between the atoms that made up my being and tried to pull it apart. I thought that I was getting torn apart, and despite what people keep telling me, I'm still not convinced I wasn't."
It looked like he had more to say, but had decided to pause and take some deep breaths. Soon he returned to normal and Lena had to give him credit for recognising and stopping an episode before it came on. She made a mental note that maybe Dr. de Kuiper wasn't as helpless and reliant as everyone had been making him out to be.
"It felt like infinity," he said in a neutral voice once he was calm. "Logically, I know that I must have only been exposed for a brief moment- otherwise I wouldn't be here to talk to you, of course."
"Of course," Lena agreed with a patient smile.
"But it felt like forever. It was as if I was everywhere but also nowhere, in a place where both existed and fought for dominion over me. And even though I made it out alive, I couldn't rid myself of a part of it."
He made a motion with his hands to the general space around him. It took Lena a couple of seconds to figure out what he meant until it dawned on her.
Of course. She couldn't hear it.
"And I think…" he continued in a whisper, leaning over the table as if he was disclosing a deep, dark secret.
"I think a part of me is still in there, too."
Lena nodded in understanding, deciding not to mention her memory of a faceless, familiar humanoid silhouette she'd caught glimpses of between flashes of time, similarly trying to claw its way between the seams of reality.
She shuddered, the thought of that time making her remember her feelings from then. 'Time heals all wounds' was a difficult mantra to follow when the wound was time itself.
"Yeah. Me too." Was all she said in return.
To her astonishment, Siebren laid his hands face-up on top of the table. Not sure what he was trying to do but not wanting to seem rude, Lena hesitantly put her hands in his large ones. He didn't pull away at the physical contact.
Even sitting down he still dwarfed her, and she absentmindedly wondered if his long, lithe fingers would break one of Hana's game controllers.
Siebren cleared his throat and Lena looked up suddenly. He'd been waiting for her to meet his steady gaze.
"You aren't alone."
Lena was about to jokingly argue that that was supposed to be her line, she'd been trying to comfort him, but before the words came out she felt a tear roll down her cheek.
Oh. Maybe she'd been more caught up in the past than she'd thought.
She wanted to pull away and wipe her face in embarrassment, but there was something in Dr. de Kuiper's wrinkled grey eyes that made her pause. Something that didn't quite look through her completely, but managed to see deeper than anyone else had been able to so far. Something that was almost pleading, hands extended as an offering of a connection she never thought she'd get. Something that reminded her of that broad-shouldered silhouette that she'd never been able to explain and haunted her still.
Even after such a small conversation, she felt like her entire outlook on Dr. de Kuiper had changed. He wasn't a broken man as she'd come to believe. No, now she saw into him the same sort of way he seemed to view her- not as a victim of an experiment, but as someone who had lived through something never meant to be seen, but had less help in recovering from it. Yes, he was troubled and his mind had been shattered, but it would be an outright lie to say he was totally out of it all the time, and now she knew that he picked up on a lot more than he let on.
More than anything though, he understood. Actual empathy rather than common sympathy was refreshing.
Lena squeezed back.
"You aren't either, doc."
Satisfied, he pulled away, leaving Lena to hurriedly scrub at her face, laughing awkwardly.
"Do you want to spend today alone, then?" she asked, doing her best to sound chipper to lighten the mood as she got up to grab a tissue.
He picked up on it and began talking equally light-heartedly.
"Ah, I think I'm alright, thank you. Our talk has… made me feel much better, all things considered. I feel much lighter."
"Is that literal?" Lena joked, before blowing her nose loudly. "Sorry."
"Not to worry," Siebren replied, and she wasn't sure what he was answering to. "Perhaps distracting myself might be the best way to go about today. It's been a long time since then and dwelling on the past will do more harm than good, I think."
Lena took a moment to listen to the shouts of her friends and teammates, audible even from here, and grimaced.
"Well, you're in luck. Because this lot can be very distracting."
He scoffed good-naturedly. "I'm aware."
"Fancy having a go against Hana? I wanna win a bet against Reinhardt on you not breaking the remote."
Siebren's chair moved itself backwards and he lifted out of it. He then lifted their empty glasses and gently placed them into the sink. When sat at a table chatting with the old man, it was very easy to forget that this was a powerful individual who could control gravity itself.
Shocking her with his choice for what felt like the tenth time that day, a small, mischievous smirk adorned Dr. de Kuiper's lips. "Well, I would hate to let you down if you've put so much faith in me."
She mirrored his expression. "Awesome! Wanna head back then?"
"Alright." Siebren looked strangely determined. As they walked (and floated) back to the common room, he said to her: "You know, I used to love piloting remote-controlled drones and model ships in my youth. I think your young friend may find her Achilles' Heel against an inconspicuous old man like me."
Lena nodded, not wanting to hurt his pride before she gave him a chance. He had been surprising her all day, after all. He deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Siebren also lost.
11-0 to Hana.