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Chapter Text

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They’re doing recon in Djibouti, where they’re scouting the perimeters of an abandoned Chinese naval base. Most of the portable electronica and wirework in the control center has been swiped clean and cracks in the concrete of the walkways run on for several feet. Two of the mooring docks have collapsed into the sea, but some of the support beams close to the shore are still standing upright, holding up platforms of asphalt, concrete and rusted wiring.

It would be unbearably hot if it weren’t for the sea breeze. Widowmaker’s taken off her gloves while they booted up a decryption program to kick-start the main servers. She’s standing curved over the keyboard, the shadow of her silhouette dragging onwards over the floor. Her throat, collarbones and sternum are gleaming with sweat, but she seems relatively unbothered otherwise.

Reaper’s returned to the main room of the control center after a quick roam through maintenance and the hallways. His footsteps echo softly through the open doorway, the sound then dies away after he comes to a standstill and leans against the doorframe. Leather of his heavy coat’s creaking softly. He crosses his arms over his chest and tilts his head to the side. His mask reflects the greenish light of the three 55inch computer screens.

It’s quiet aside from the electrical fans of the main servers, swirling restlessly. Widowmaker straightens her back, but doesn’t cast a glance in his direction, instead she starts to rub her right ring finger. He kicks the heel of his left foot against the doorframe. Small noises like these should draw her attention right away, but she remains focused on her hand for some reason.

“What are you doing?” He asks, with a voice gruff from the heat.

Her profile is cut out across the green binary looping endlessly on the computer screen. Her voice clear and cold as she responds, “Nothing.”

Widowmaker levels him a look, still rubbing the same finger absentmindedly. He cocks his head back and huffs, staring off at the hardware of the main servers or the glow of the screens spread out over the floor. He kicks his heel against the metal doorframe again, hard, and the dull sound seems to rattle throughout the room. There’s no reaction from her and the white noise of the electric fans from the servers soon cushions the silence again. The claws of his gauntlets dig a little bit deeper into the thick material of his coat.

“System unlocked.” She says curtly, as the screen flashes from dark to light and casts a silver sheen over her gloves, folded on the edge of the large desk.

Her statement wasn’t intended to draw any sort of response, but Reaper turns his head to observe the left screen and mutters something under his breath. Icons are neatly organized on the right. They were sent here to retrieve the malware the cyber unit on this navy base was devising. While the Chinese probably planned to use the malware in jamming the electronical navigational and communication systems of hostile ships passing by the Gulf of Aden, Talon was determined to upgrade and use the program to disable the GPS and communication systems aboard any vehicle and mecha-suit completely.

Overwatch used to employ a few former members of China’s offensive cyber unit. They were fast, efficient, effective and generally good at obeying orders. Reaper remembers the ones he’d killed after the Swiss HQ disaster; he tracked them down to a naval control center on Hainan and shot the entire facility there to pieces.

She pushes down on an icon and the map spreads out over all three screens. There are over three hundred files in there, all titled in Chinese. Her finger taps the file in the upper-right corner, but instead of a pop-up demanding a password, there’s an error message. Reaper walks over and comes to stand next to her, notices how she’s started to rub her ring finger again but doesn’t mention it this time. His shoulders are squared, his head tilted to the side, staring down at her.

“What is it now?” He demands, his voice a hiss, the black eyes of his mask pushing the full weight of a menacing glare down upon her.

Widowmaker narrows her eyes and mutters a curse under her breath; she swipes the window away and tries to open other files only to get the exact same result again and again. Next to her, Reaper’s body starts to flicker from solid to plumes of black smoke as he repeats himself. What is it now?—a deep growl, given a hollow quality by his mask.

“The files are damaged.” She answers slowly, seemingly unperturbed by the display. “ICT back at the Asayta base might be able to restore them. I will try and set up a stable connection.” Her accent slants the pronunciation of the last word.

There’s a loud noise coming in from the hallway—one of the venom mines Widowmaker attached to the ceiling of the entrance hall must’ve exploded. Crude yelling resonates afterwards. Reaper grunts and turns back towards to the open doorway, right hand on the stock of his shotgun, coat bellowing from the movement.

“Stragglers?” She suggests, eyebrows arched, glancing at him from her peripheral.

He responds matter-of-factly, “Doesn’t matter. They’re dead anyway.”

With those words, Reaper shadow-steps out of the main room and leaves her to the soft buzzing and the swirling fans of the servers. She busies herself with the task at hand; establishing a secure connection to access Talon’s data cloud, uploading the three hundred something files, and purging the software of the servers. Her gaze falls onto her right ring finger again. She sees what she always sees: blue skin, a slender finger, small scars and a short-clipped nail. There’s something missing, but it’s difficult for her to pinpoint what exactly.

Concessive rounds ring a staccato through the corridor, followed by high-pitched wailing and screaming. Widowmaker puts both hands on the keyboard and begins to type.

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Patterns of waves reflect on the underside of the Brigittenauer Brücke, the streetlights along the highway simultaneously flicker on as the evening falls, and the flow of traffic moves on interrupted. In the front window of the car, the Millennium Tower cuts through the skyscape of the Handelskai, towering above the other buildings with relative ease. The boardwalks are crowded with people, but their rowdiness is canceled out by the classical music on the radio. Widowmaker leans her head against the tinted window and closes her eyes briefly. Her nose wrinkles involuntarily. She recognizes this song from somewhere.

Reaper’s driving shotgun, strapped in next to the getaway driver Talon assigned them for this mission, tapping his claws over the barrel of his SBS aimlessly and staring straight ahead. Strike team Charlie is already on location. They’re assigned to act as a diversion while Reaper and Widowmaker extract classified files from the underground archives, ordered to stage a hostage situation for two hours maximum and take out as much security as possible during. At the end of the two hour timeframe, Reaper has to relocate to the tech center, use the EPFCG to set off the electromagnetic pulse and overload the building’s electrical wiring, and meet up with Widowmaker near the parking lot of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Briefings with the team coordinator will come after, back at the safe house in the Thaliastraße.

The cushioning inside of her helmet feels warm against her cheek and she subconsciously leans into that warmth, only to thump the crown of her head against the window. “Angelique, Louise, Amélie et Thérèse, pas de quatre.” Her ballet instructor demands from her spot next to the stereo installation, pressing the play button. Fluorescent tubes brighten up the room, blank aside from the barre and the wall lined up with mirrors. Four of the seven girls walk over to the center and stand in the fifth position.

Her eyes shoot open; the music the ballet instructor in her memory plays is exactly the same as the one playing in the car. Front foot’s heel at your back foot’s toe, take Louise’ left hand in your left, look in the mirror as you do the demi plié. There’s only the front seat with the back of Reaper’s hood peeking above the head rest. She’s eight year’s old, smaller than Angelique, and a bit skinnier, her mop of brown hair pulled in a tight bun, her legs stuffed into white tights, her cheeks rosy and the button of her nose too.

“I know this song.” Widowmaker murmurs, shifts in her seat, squeezes the armrest subconsciously and straightens her back. Her mind’s fogged up, as if she can’t decide whether she’s still there in the motion of the dance or sitting here on her way to the UN Headquarters.

Reaper snorts and retorts brusquely, “Everyone does. It’s a classic tune.”

She blinks owlishly, regards her rifle pressed into the space between the driver’s seat and the backseat for a brief moment and tries to shake off this sense of dissonance, of disassociation.

Yet she finds herself voicing the question on the tip of her tongue, “What’s the title?”

There’s a tense silence, tempered with only by the driver shifting gear and taking the exit for the bridge, then the song skips to the next one. Reaper eventually mutters, “Fuck if I know what it’s actually called.” After a curt pause, he continues, “It’s part of Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky.”

Her response is a low hum, drawn out like a purr almost. “Maman! Maman!” She storms through the academy’s double doors, down the steps to her mother’s car. Afternoon sunlight reflects on the metallic color, pools a molten white on the asphalt and nearly blinds her, makes her hide her forehead with the back of her hand. Her mother’s laughter resounds as she slows down to a halt next to the open car door. Her face is flushed, but the giddiness she feels translates in her inability to stay still. Her fingers curl around the straps of her sports’ bag. How can she concentrate on those meaningless details, but seem unable to recall what the woman looked like, can’t even recall her face.

“Qu’est-ce tu as appris aujourd’hui, ma bichette?” Her mother questions cheerfully while she takes over the sport’s bag, walks over to the back and pops the hood of the car open —Widowmaker doesn’t know why but she replies without pause, “Pas de quatre avec mes amies et Angelique. Sur la danse des petits cygnes.”

She spots Reaper looking at her through the rearview mirror when he asks with a note of suspicion to his voice, “What was all that about? The title of the song?”

“Je suis pas certaine…I believe so, yes.” Her reply doesn’t follow her usual manner of speech; there’s hesitation, a pause for breath, soft-spoken.

Widowmaker realizes she has to gather her scrambled thoughts and get it together, but these flashes complicate the situation. Her fingers firmly clench around the armrest, when she continues to say, “We should stay focused on the objective.”

“Keep your head in the game then.” Reaper rebukes testily, implicating that he won’t burke any distractions on this mission, claws drumming restlessly over the barrel of the shotgun in his lap and head angled to overlook the river Danube.

The railing of the bridge flashes by in one narrow stripe from up close as the car signals for the highway exit. Two black BMWs hurl past them at high speed, the growl of their engines chasing the tires, before they’re driving off the bridge on the A22. Widowmaker leans her head back against the headrest and takes a deep breath, not daring to close her eyes again.

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Their bedroom is white with floorboards made of oak wood; the bed faces the large double windows leading out to the small balcony that overlooks the city, the dresser against the left wall is white as well, cluttered with scented candles, picture frames and a potted pink geranium, and she’s still in bed, watching Gérard smoke a cigarette outside on the reclining chair in his sleeping robe. His bedhead is even more ruffled by the wind, his profile cut through by the window frame, the trail of smoke from his mouth trails off in a thin wisp above the irony balcony railing. Her feet poke from underneath the sheets, her gaze falls onto the shelves of book hanging on the wall next to the window, her fist comes up to stifle a yawn. Amélie smiles drowsily, sinking into the pillows, waiting for her husband to come back to bed.

She takes a steadying breath, adjusts her position and uncrosses her arms, keeping them listlessly at her sides. Another episode of a life she can’t fully recall popped up in her mind, another sign the neural reconditioning Talon subjected her to is slowly coming undone. It should prompt her to swing by the medic bay for a thorough examination but some small rebellious part of her prevents her from pulling through. Widowmaker likes to think of it as plain curiosity, a chance to understand the person who came before. Her cheeks are moist, warm, such a contrast to the cool fingerpads of her gloves. What’s the harm?—as long as it doesn’t interfere with her performances.

The heavy metal doors slides open with a hiss, exposing the relatively dark room to the glaring lights of the hallway. Reaper steps in and judging by the briskness of his footfalls, he’s irritated. She calmly swipes her fingertips over her cheekbone and remains quiet, regarding him stomp around the room. Tendrils of smoke crowd around his shoulders, the tails of his coat and his hood, blurring the outline of his silhouette. He growls lowly, sweeps his arm over the desk and knocks the tablet, ammo cases and gun cleaning kit onto the floor.

This in turn makes her clack her tongue and prompt, “Mission didn’t go as planned, mon chèr?”

“Give me a break.” Reaper rebuffs, whirling around to face her. “That overgrown ape ruined everything…” There’s a deliberate pause as he takes a few steps closer to her.

Widowmaker tenses when his claws curl under her chin and force her head back, turning her right cheek to the light streaming in from the open doorway. “Laisse-moi.” She hisses, the back of her hand coming up against his forearm.

“What’s the matter with you now? You look like you’ve been crying.” He emphasizes the last word with a hint of irritation and then lets go of her jaw.

“Lacroix?”

She narrows her eyes, unable to determine whether he said the words himself or some figment of a distant past did. Gérard’s holding her hand as they walk through the airport terminal, with the wheels of his baggage trolley dragging on behind them. Sunlight cascades through the glass in the curved ceiling, connected directly to the floor by slanted steel beams. He’s reassuring him about the mission timeframe, that she won’t have to miss him for long, that the risks aren’t that high, but he stops talking the moment he spots a tall guy in black near the check-in desk with a large Adidas bag at his feet.

Reaper still stands dangerously close to her, no doubt assessing her from behind his mask. He has a scowl on his scarred face and addresses her husband directly, but his expression softens when he notices her. Then he extends his hand to greet her properly and introduces himself as Gérard’s commanding officer. His accent is American, she can tell as much, but from where in the States, she can’t guess.

“Gabriel Reyes.” Widowmaker rasps, seeing him how he once was and how he is now at all once, her voice clipped, but confident.

Reaper huffs displeased and slams the palm of his hand flat next to her head. She doesn’t flinch, not even when he drags his claws down the wall like a predator. His other hand comes to cover his mask. His claws curve over the outline of his mask and twist it towards the inside of his hood.

Small scabs and blisters cover the expanse of his face,  missing a nose and patches of skin around his lower cheek, brow and chin, exposing bone and gum and teeth. Scars skirt across his right cheekbone, the tissue contrasting a ghastly pale against his darker skin tone. The back of her head bumps into the concrete wall, but her expression is carefully kept neutral. His eyes wrinkle when he sneers at her, showing more teeth than lip or gum. Dark locks of hair poke from underneath the hood, curling flat over his forehead.

“No,” It’s gruff and curt, continued in an almost defeated voice, “Gabriel Reyes died at the Swiss HQ blast. This is all that’s left of his handsome face.” The corners of his lips furl upwards in a grin that resembles an overripe plum, split open.

“I’ve seen worse, mon chèr.” She murmurs with a sly smirk, making a fist with her left hand, keeping her knuckles pressed tight against her upper leg. Her gaze holds his, unobscured for the first time in an undoubtedly long while.

Tacks on the I’ve done worse as an afterthought—thinking about Gérard’s expression a fleeting moment before she pointed the handgun at him; the unsettling change from bedroom eyes to unadulterated shock, the white of his eyes a stark contrast with the dimmed lighting around them, point à blanc. The shot suppressed almost completely by the silencer, aside from a sibilant hiss.

So close she could feel the blood and pieces of skull splatter onto her face as the bullet tore through his cranium and lodged itself stuck in the back of his brain. It’s the only time she felt anything during the entire evening.

He leans back and guffaws depreciatingly, spits out, “You’re thinking of Lacroix, aren’t you? You did yourself and the whole fucking world a favor by taking him out.”

His words resonate within a part of her and she feels like crying out that he’s wrong, but she doesn’t understand the reasoning behind the instinctual reflex. Gérard wasn’t her first hit as Widowmaker, Amélie Lacroix was all technicalities considered, and yet some synchronization between the woman and herself must’ve occurred. Widowmaker doesn’t experience emotions, doesn’t have much to recollect aside from mission objectives, but there’s a whole life inside her mind that she’s now aware of, at least of bits and pieces.

She should report this to the head scientist on base and go through a new procedure of reconditioning.

She should’ve reported this a long time ago already.

Widowmaker holds his gaze and replies in an even voice, “I was ordered to eliminate him and so I did. Nothing more, nothing less.”

There’s a hint of—not wonder, but thinly-veiled surprise on his mutilated features, like he was caught off guard by her stoic response, then it’s gone again and he smirks and shakes his head. Her brows furrow together in suspicion.

Reaper shoves his mask back into place and comments off-handedly, “You haven’t gotten a brain checkup in three weeks.”

“I’m not a liability.” On the surface, she neither sounds or looks agitated, but it’s implied in the choice of words, in the slight shifting of her weight onto her left leg.

He breaks away from the wall—and her, showing her his broad back, making his way over to the desk once more. His hands come down harshly on the tabletop, but he doesn’t look back at her. “To whom could you be one? Talon? Or yourself?”

“I’m not a liability” Widowmaker repeats in a scoff, sliding the side of her left foot up and down her calf, arms crossed in front of her chest once more. “I am in control.”

Footsteps echo throughout the hallway, followed up by chatter. Reaper cranes his neck from left to right to ease the strain and rolls his shoulders back.

“I bet that’s not what Talon had in mind for you.” It’s an insightful but cynical remark, the inflection of his voice muffled by his mask, hiding whether it was actually meant to be insightful or cynical.

She heaves a sigh and watches a couple of technicians walk by the open doorway, not bothering to cast a curious glance inside. One of them is holding a standard-issued toolbox in his right hand, both are wearing helmets. Talon’s insignia’s embroidered on the neckline of their jackets. She tilts her head back to observe Reaper again, but he seems content to remain lost in his own thoughts.

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Chapter Text

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King’s Cross slowly disappears behind the metal jaws of the closing aircraft gates, shutting off the vibrant lights of the buildings and streets below. Her gaze flicks to the floor, to the tips of her own boots before she’s left alone with the darkness in the tail-end of the plane. She turns around and stalks over to the cockpit in an even, controlled pace. Her rifle’s a familiar weight that grounds her while memories hound her throughout the short walk.

Images of a luxurious hallway with checkered marble tiles; the frames of the doors gilded gold to match the chandeliers dangling sparkling crystals from the ceiling, accompanied by footfalls and Gérard’s breathless voice against her ear, tu me fais le plus heureux des hommes du monde.

“Mission status, completed.” Widowmaker intones dispassionately as she enters the cockpit and settles her back against the wall. She angles the barrel of her rifle to the floor and keeps her chin down.

In one long-drawn exhale, the rush of adrenalin dissipates and leaves her empty and composed, but no longer unfeeling like before. There’s no escape to Amélie’s memories flashing in front of her open eyes, diluting the vibrantly decorated hallway of her wedding reception into the gray, stale and cold cockpit interior with its huge control board full of switches, flickering lights and buttons.

One operative looks at her from over his shoulder; the microphone of his headset pressed against his mouth, his nose crooked from being broken in the past, and his cheekbones high and sharp.

“Reaper requested you specifically for a co-op in Brussels at zero five hundred hours. Mission details will be given at the drop point. Arrival estimated at zero zero twenty.” He relays the order in a nasal voice and sniffs daintily before looking back at the radar screen.

Widowmaker raises an eyebrow. She was scheduled for a biomedical checkup and a CT scan back at HQ after this mission, an appointment she’s been secretly steeling herself for now that the memories have been popping up more frequently. Coincidence?, she muses silently as she shifts her weight and tilts her head back. Peut-être.

So her newfound autonomy can be enjoyed for a while longer, that at least is a comforting thought. There’s some minor turbulence that makes the pilot’s mug of coffee shake in its cup holder. She blinks owlishly and finally closes her eyes, focusing solely on her other senses to focus on her immediate surroundings: the floor beneath her feet, the wall behind her back, the rifle in her hands.

People crowd around to congratulate her—faces Widowmaker recognizes herself; Reyes, Amari, the woman she scrapped with just now, and faces she can’t place immediately; a tall boisterous man with a German accent, a couple of Americans, more people she assumes to be Gérard’s colleagues or acquaintances. She’s feeling light-headed, dizzy from all the attention, voices, handshakes and cheek kisses, and the music too, an ever-present play of strings.

There’s a cello quartet playing on a small elevated stage in the right corner of the ballroom, three women in dresses and one man in a three-piece, under a bar of spotlights. Chatter, laughter and the rattle of glass on silver platters emphasize the gentle music. She looks down and expects to see her wearing a wedding gown but instead she’s in her bodysuit, the marble tiles of the ballroom floor turned into the rough carpeting of the aircraft cockpit. Her eyelids flutter open, a soft sigh slipped past her lips, and her eyes sting lightly.

Let’s try that again, she amends as she breathes in deep through her nostrils and closes her eyes once more.

It’s easy to step right back into the ballroom: a high ceiling, cream-colored wallpaper run through with a floral relief, the long rectangular table hidden underneath a table cloth, platters of hors-d’oeuvres and champagne flutes, and three vases with the arrangement of her wedding bouquet; at the top, middle and end. You really pulled out all the stops, she hears the youngest American whistle and say. Gérard chuckles in that particular way he has and replies heavily-accented, I have to show her off, I mean look at her, she’s gorgeous. They do then and she stares back at them, a flush on her cheeks, caught eavesdropping.

Gérard holds out his hand to invite her to dance, but her forearm is blue and tattooed across with spider webs, and the word couchemar is spelled out boldly, a half-truth, a foreboding omen. Everything falls away until only the dead of night behind the enforced window glass of the cockpit is left, stricken through by the pilot’s and co-pilot’s backs.

It shouldn’t matter, Widowmaker scolds herself, but somehow it does. Whether it’s a fragment of Amélie longing for the most important day of her life or her own morbid curiosity to see herself parading in a dead woman’s dress, she doesn’t know. But it’s there, nestled in the pit of her stomach.

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Their base of operations in Brussels is a rundown B&B at the outskirts of the city, in a multiethnic neighborhood. It’s not even the crack of dawn and aside from a road sweeper, the street is pretty much abandoned. She breathes in the cold night air and finds herself wishing it stung within her lungs. Her gaze falls on the Turkish bridal boutique across, with its brightly-lit show window, faceless mannequins and neon lettering on the front. There’s an itch under her skin that needs scratching.

Mission outline was brief; information theft from the Polish commissioner’s private terminal and a virus upload as a smoke screen on the EU Commission’s VPN. Security clearance has been provided through bribery.

Widowmaker didn’t understand why she—or Reaper for that matter, were involved in what should be a routine mission for Talon’s expert hackers, let alone why Reaper even requested her participation specifically. It’s personal, he’d only offered as an explanation during the ride from the airport to the city, and I want to see the job done. She’s reluctant to interpret his statement as a token of trust in more than her capabilities, trust that she’s more than the sum of her parts, foreign and mismatched as they may be sometimes.

Reaper trails behind her as she crosses the street towards the gaudy bridal boutique, bracing the bright lighting from behind the window glass against her face. Her trench coat billows against her legs as she comes to a sudden halt directly in front of a mannequin. He doesn’t comment on how she scrutinizes her reflection and how the dress would supposedly fit her, but the curiosity is apparent in the way he cranes his neck back and forth between her and the show window.

“Did it look like this one?” She speaks up to ask, bringing her arms to her sides and squaring her shoulders to mimic the mannequin’s pose.

He adjusts his posture as well, his mask whiter than bone under the harsh lighting, and the cartridges strapped across his chest reflect spots of white on the red.

“Did what look…” He stops his sentence short and turns to regard her, continuing with a hint of incredulity, “Are you getting nostalgic, now?”

It’s an extravagant gown with the bodice covered in sequins, flowing over into the tulle over the skirt. Sleeveless, but the straps are lacy and seem to come together at the back of the neck. The corner of her mouth quirks upwards as she considers herself in the wedding dress. She narrows her eyes as she looks over at the other ones; tight and fish-tailed or tight and mini-skirted, another one like this one but in a deep offsetting red. They’re all wrong, don’t fit the vague image in her mind of what the dress is supposed to be like.

“Yours was less like a goddamned cake. More stylish, I guess. Lots of lace, fuck, I don’t know how to actually describe what it looked like.” Reaper mutters, then tacks on for good measure, “It was white and you had a veil.”

He’s left that part of his life behind—although it’s debatable whether it’s just a part or the entirety of his life; his words were genuine back there. Gabriel Reyes died in the Swiss HQ blast. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t remember at all. Fancy place Gérard rented just outside of Paris, with an expansive and well-maintained garden; the sunlight catching in the windows of the ballroom and throwing a silvery line over the run-through marble tiles; Bach’s cello suite forming the backdrop when the happy couple entered, and his heart hitching in his chest like it’s supposed to, at such a sight.

Casting a glance over his shoulder, back at the sloppily bleached front of the B&B, he brusquely asks, “What does it matter, anyway?”

Her expression changes from stoic to angry for a split-second, as if she was going to open her mouth and snap at him that it does matter, but instead she keeps her cool and shrugs. Turns away from the shop window to overlook the street and the collection of empty beer cans next to the trashcan and the bench, either pretending or really having lost interest in the topic.

“Just curious.” Widowmaker replies with thinly veiled amusement in her voice, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her trench coat.

Reaper could take the bait, she thinks, could demand whether she’s speaking for herself or for Amélie or if there’s still a difference between the two. She has half a mind to ask him whether he knew she was scheduled for a biomedical checkup, but his reply tugs her away from her own thoughts.

“Curiosity kills.” He drags out the ‘s’ in the last word, to make the sound of it more ominous.

His coat whips around in the wind as he swerves around on his heels to show his back to the store front, his shotguns strapped in tight against his thighs, arms crossed in front of his chest. Widowmaker puts a stray lock of hair behind her ear; her helmet’s in for a quick maintenance routine, just in case, the scuffle with that woman could’ve damaged the infrared cameras inside.

“Ah, but that’s not the end of the saying now is it, mon chèr?” She murmurs in a tease, secretly delighting in how her words make him shift on his legs. “Comment on dit en anglais? Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, non?”

He makes a sound somewhere between a scoff and a huff, and comments in a low, scratchy voice, “It wasn’t satisfaction that brought me back.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure.” It’s spoken in an airily voice, accentuated with the casualness of her pose; her knuckles under her chin, her gaze up at the light-polluted sky. “Revenge can be very satisfactory, or so I’ve heard.” Her lips furl into something akin to a grimace; as if she’s wistful about his sense of purpose.

“Better make sure it’s executed properly then.” He deadpans, but she feels the weight of his stare on her shoulders and it’s only when she moves to cross the street, that he does so as well. Close to her back, like a shadow.

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While the headlines of news sites still focus on the assassination of Mondatta, there are some articles that speculate the virus outbreak on the EU Commission’s servers wasn’t just coincidental, but most report the incident as it was, an incident. Soon enough the attention of journalists will be drawn to the failed museum bust, unless the reformed Overwatch tries to keep the story under wraps.

Her heartbeat’s racing like it did when Amari blasted off a piece from her helmet, the bullet grazing her cheek, the blood in her veins racing for a change. Yet this is different from the surge of irritation she felt back then, this is so much more volatile.

Reaper’s livid, pounding one armored fist into the wall and leaving a sizeable dent behind. His chest is heaving, his biceps straining under the thick leather of his coat, his boots dug into the floor and his face most likely contorted in a vicious snarl behind his mask. She finds herself wanting to do the same thing he’s doing, express the rage that bubbles up inside of her, kindle the anger from a smoldering core within her belly. Give in.

“So this is what you meant with that overgrown ape ruining everything.” Her accent is heavy, tinging the pronunciation of the shakily-spoken words. Her hand clenches into a fist and her gaze falls onto the dent in the wall.

Smoke softens the usually harsh, defining lines of his shoulders, blurring them out into the air. The bright lighting from the practice range’s fluorescent tubes accentuate the almost silver coloring of the spine markings in his coat. Rifles are lined up in the cabinet at the back of the service area, while the protective gear, pistols and ammo are kept in the row of lockers lined against the right wall, she tears her gaze away from them.

After debrief, Reaper stormed off to the practice range, but instead of taking his anger out on the bots at the back of the shooting lanes, he’d started pacing in wraith form and raking his claws down the ballistic glass.  

“I’ll kill them.” His vow doesn’t come across as solemn, no, it’s raw and biting, more teeth than lip as usual with him. “I’ll kill them all.”

Widowmaker rebuffs quickly, “Non… I should’ve killed that little annoyance myself back in London. Her life is mine to take.”

He stalks closer to her, wants to back her up against the wall but she steadfastly holds her ground, holds his gaze from behind the black gauze in his mask. Wisps of dark purplish smoke crowd around her head and torso, dragging onwards the monstrous shape of his own body. She hears the flapping of bird wings from nearby. Her eyes narrow into slits.

“Don’t you remember her?” Reaper prompts and she can imagine his fucked up mouth twisted in a sneer. “Tracer. Overwatch. I’ve got her on my list for a while now. But you might remember her as Lena Oxton. She was at your wedding too.”

Shadows shroud around her arms, but don’t touch her directly. She blinks slowly as she takes in what he just said. She knew that already, but does that explain why the woman was so desperate back in King’s Cross, crouched over her on the rooftop. So surprised when she had chuckled and flipped the both of them off the building. Was she a beloved friend of Amélie at one point?

“All the more reason you should leave her to me, Reaper.” Widowmaker rebukes in a scoff, but he doesn’t let up. Her features scrunch up in a defiant scowl.

And he barks out a laugh then, spits it out like it would leave a foul taste in his mouth, black gal from deep within his hollowed-out lungs. She’s hit by the sudden desire to feel his breath on her face, just to determine whether it was hot and alive, or cold like morning mist and sickly too.

“If you keep watching my back, I just might.” It sounds deceptively sincere to her ears and the surprise translates onto her expression. Her lips part and her pupils slightly widen in response.

Reaper gets out of her personal space, solidifies and tugs onto the straps wrapped around his left elbow, attached to the inside of his clawed gauntlet. They’ve left a soft reddish imprint on his ghastly skin. She glances back at his masked face.

Her stomach is tied up in knots, dizzy from spinning around on the dancefloor with the skirt of her gown catching between her ankles, a bit unsteady on her heels. Her dancing partner, the tall German, leads her back to a small group of people chattering with Gérard, Reyes and the young American; the palm of his hand is huge against her lower back but she offers him a grateful smile and laughs politely at his boisterous compliment. Lena comes to stand next to her and takes some of her veil between two tentative fingertips, feels the soft lacy material and marvels over it.

The young American elbows Reyes in the guts and nudges towards her with a cheeky grin. Gérard regards the two men with some apprehension and smiles nervously when Reyes grumbles something under his breath in Spanish. She tilts her head quizzically when her husband’s commander addresses her directly. Her name roughened by his voice, by the way it glides off the tip of his tongue. His hand on his left elbow, tugging onto the material of his suit jacket. The straps snap back against his bare skin with a dull, resounding smack.

She shakes her head and looks off to the side, smirking to herself as she mutters, “Oh, I intend to keep you to that.”

.

Talon’s operations in Egypt had been routinely sabotaged for over a month until Reaper requested them both to be transferred and deployed at the base there. He’d seemed eager almost, judging by his predatory gait through the corridors and the information center, and the way he reassembled his shotguns after cleaning, stroking the tips of his claws over the engraving on the side of the SBS’ body. As Widowmaker had been assigned a run-through-the-mill assassination mission in Sharm el-Sheikh, Reaper volunteered to remain behind as an extra security measure.

She didn’t inquire after the motives behind his decision and the only response she got when she commented that the Egypt base didn’t have the facilities for an extensive biomedical checkup, was non-committal humming.

Crackling resounds through her com, chasing away the razor-sharp edge of her concentration. She shifts on her elbows, resettles the Widow’s Kiss on the biped and peers through the scope again. The view is still the same; the large square window of the hotel room remains open, the sheer curtains fluttering about, the interior untouched, the small balcony empty. More crackling, followed by a curt beep. Her breathing stays controlled. She’s on the flat rooftop of a holiday resort, waiting.

“Reaper, here.” His voice slices through the silence, like a clean cut, followed by a curt wave of static.

Her finger swipes reflexively over the curve of her rifle’s trigger, her cheek and piece of her helmet covering the side of her face press harder against the side of the gun, and her brows furrow together as she observes through the scope how the hotel room door gets pushed open. Her target walks in, gesticulating enthusiastically as she’s talking to someone on the phone.

He starts talking again, “The base is compromised, reroute back to the first drop point after you’ve finished your mission.”

Widowmaker squints one eye shut as she lines up her shot, forefinger curling around the trigger in anticipation. She tries to focus on her slowed-down heartbeat but there’s something off about the pace, dismisses the thought and takes a deep breath. Pulls the trigger. Exhales through her nostrils. Her target drops her cell in shock and she watches through her scope how the phone falls screen-first onto the soft carpeting of the hotel room, how the woman sinks to her knees with a bullet hole between her eyes and slumps over sideways.

This was supposed to be the end of it all; disassemble the biped and place it back into the classic black briefcase her handler provided, relocate to the drop point close to the Tropicana Jasmine club and wait to be picked up. Further instructions were unnecessary in her opinion, so the low growl slipping into her eardrum from over the com line makes her hesitate for a split-second, her expectations crossed-out with the hush of one simple sound.

“Ana Amari’s back on the list. She faked being dead. Was the one fucking sabotaging everything.”

She hisses the word under her breath. Impossible. Her mind is reeling from the brand new information, struggling to comprehend how Amari managed to claw back upright after such a devastating shot wound. It was a critical hit. And she played dead then, for how many years? Should’ve stayed down. Her suitcase gets clicked shut, her rifle retracted and strapped to her back, and her helmet shifted over her eyes.

Widowmaker repeats herself, louder, into the mic of her helmet, so he can hear her. “Impossible. I had a clear shot at her head. She couldn’t have… Merde.” Softer, the curse again, “Merde.”

“Teamed up with Morrison. But we’ll get them next time.” Reaper says, not to placate her and her anger, but there’s something oddly genuine about his last statement. As if he’s confessing to her, that he couldn’t take them both on at the same time.

That maybe if she had been there, things would’ve turned out differently.

Her footfalls are hushed by the sea breeze, the traffic below near the touristic hotspots of Naama bay and the cawing of seagulls near the silver-gray tube of the roof ventilator. Red blurs move together in troves down on the sidewalks of the main road, but the smaller streets are far less crowded and easier to maneuver from up-above as she swings from rooftop to rooftop with her grappling hook.

“Any intel on where we will meet up to press the chase?” Widowmaker asks as she stands on the edge of the roof, aiming for the railing of the emergency stairs of the building next to her.

Reaper grits out that they aren’t to pursue Morrison and Amari for the time being and she doesn’t have to guess whether he shares their superiors’ opinions on the matter or not. The rope of the grappling hook darts out in a smooth line and the hook itself opens up like a three-fingered claw only to shut around the railing in a deathtrap. She tugs once, twice to check if the railing of the stairs is sturdy enough and then she’s flying through the open air for a whole three-four seconds. Her feet collide flatly with the metal surface of the stairs and make the steps clatter.

“What are we ordered to do then?” And the exasperation shouldn’t be noticeable in her tone of voice—shouldn’t even be there, but it shimmers through in the way she emphasizes the last word hotly.

Widowmaker puts her hand on the railing, shifts her helmet away from her eyes and overlooks the streets from the vantage point to plan out the following stage of her escape. Static interrupted by the almost inaudible rustle of coattails whipping in the wind, several background noises like people and cars, then a growl barely muffled by the inside of his mask.

He mutters derisively in response, “Waste our time on the next assignment.”

.

They’re squatting in one of the shut-down factories of Volskaya Industries in the proximity of the Ural Mountains; most of the Svyatogor line is currently produced exclusively in Siberia, but before the hostile omnic takeover on the offset of the second Omnic Crisis, Volskaya Industries manufactured conventional arms at numerous locations in the Russian Federation. After the fusion with Kalashnikov concern in 2029 and a highly lucrative contract with the Russian Federation defense forces in 2031, the R&D department came up with and tested the possibility of the concept of mechanized walkers, becoming the infamous Svyatogor. Production moved up to Siberia from that point.

This former rifle-manufacturing complex has been closed since the 2030s, stripped of its hardware components such as the robotic arms, computer desktops, the steel beams in the production line itself and the copper wiring plucked from the ceilings; some still dangling from a square panel of ceiling that’s never gotten replaced. And now Talon’s converted the abandoned industrial complex in an operating base for raids on freight cargo.

It’s quiet in the production line area, far-removed from the hustle and bustle of Talon operatives in the office buildings around the factory itself. There’s a stack of folded cardboard boxes pinched between red steel bars in the upper right corner, the production lines themselves have been disassembled safe for their actual bulk, left barren of rubber and small steel slots; the linoleum floor tiles are dirty and no matter where you walk, the smell of rust is persistent, ever-present. Perhaps the one redeeming feature of the entire building is the curved steel spine of the roof, flanked by large triple-glazed windows that sort of shape the light coming through them.

Widowmaker’s perched on a small stool near the emergency exit, cleaning her rifle with a shred of cloth dipped in gun oil. There’s an open gun cleaning kit at her feet, the barrel and stock of Widow’s Kiss placed on a frayed rag on the floor next to the kit, while her helmet’s on a table where one of the three hundred robotic arms used to be installed. Her movements are automatic and fluent, her hair in a loose ponytail down her back, and her gaze unfocused, half-lidded.

His palm warm-pressed on the small of her back, her hand in his, and his lead easy to follow along the expanse of the ballroom. She stares up at his profile; his beard trimmed, the hinge of his jawline strong and his adam’s apple well-defined, his black curls cut short, but his gaze off to the sidelines, to his colleagues. Other couples waltz around them, but they’re fast-moving shapes and colors, a visual representation of the music’s cadence, while she can hear the melody as a heartbeat between her ears. His gaze shifts to her face and she dares to smile up at him shyly. Gabriel Reyes offers her an inclination of his head and a small smirk in return, the harsh lines around his mouth and eyes softened. It feels a little bit like a victory.

“You can waltz.” She remarks out loud, while she finishes up cleaning the body of her rifle. Her hands feel somewhat greasy from the gun oil.

She doesn’t know if Reaper looks through the blue holographic screen the tablet in his claws project, or instead keeps his attention focused solely on the decrypted data. Judging by a lack of immediate response, she supposes it’s the latter.

Until he chuckles gruffly and mutters, “Yeah, so can you.”

Her brows furrow together in a frown. Widowmaker considers his words in earnest. She recalls how the floral relief in the wallpaper seemed to move as they moved, how her gloved hand felt secure in his larger and coarser one, but the melody of the song’s more foggy and she draws a blank when she wants to remember the steps of the dance. Moonlight falls down the windows in the roof in thick columns, illuminating the swirls of dust in the production line area.   

“Non.” Her tone of voice is soft, her right hand clenches into a fist atop of her rifle, but she keeps her head held high as she continues, “I forgot.”

Reaper balances the tablet on one knee and leans his head back against the wall to observe her from behind his mask. The red ornaments on his knee guards seem to blaze in the darkness, contrasted by the play of shadows from where he’s seated, while his mask reflects the pale blue of the holographic screen. Widowmaker leans over and calmly puts the body of her rifle down on the floor, then she grabs a cleaning rod from the kit, a few wads of cotton, the bottle of gun oil and her rifle’s long and narrow barrel.

“It’s not that difficult to learn.” He remarks matter-of-fact as he swipes through another page. She thinks the language on the screen is Spanish, but it’s difficult to read inverse.

This gets answered by an incredulous scoff, a question redundant to her own ears, “And who would teach me?”

Talon would never send her on an undercover mission; there’s simply no purpose to her knowing how to waltz, and it would only be considered a waste of time, of effort. She wets one of the cotton wads with gun oil, wraps it around the cleaning rod and proceeds by sticking the rod into the barrel. It’s a quick and easy process and as she works, she starts to bounce her left leg impatiently.

“I would, for a favor.” Reaper responds casually, as he switches his tablet off and puts it down beside him on the floor.

Widowmaker tilts her head and prompts with a note of suspicion to her voice, “And what do you want in return then, mon chèr?”

There’s a beat of stilted silence as he places the palm of his hand over his mask and tugs it aside, and this time she can’t stifle a gasp escaping her through pursed lips. His face is disintegrating; shreds of his skin dissolving into thick columns of reddish black smoke, leaving the bone and muscle structure of his skull partially exposed, but that’s not everything. There seems to be a glitch in the make-up of his organic system, because the deep-dyed red outline of eyes are projected atop and underneath his actual ones. He seems to have more canines too, as if the cells of his own body are mistaking how they’re supposed to set up. Was his mask the only thing holding his head together?

“Dead body. I need to recuperate, haven’t eaten in days.” He says in explanation before settling the mask in front of his face once more. His claws glide down the smooth surface of the mask, making a low screeching sound.

Her pupils are wide-blown, her voice harried as she mutters, “But, there’s no one to hunt for miles.”

“We’re raiding a freight train in two hours.” Reaper doesn’t sound too concerned about the matter, scrutinizing her from his spot.

Despite herself and the darkness, she can still see multiple pairs of eyes within columns of smoke, as if they’re now printed on the back of her eyelids. Her grip on the cleaning rod becomes like a vice; an instinctual reflex she’d drop both the rod and the barrel of her rifle if she didn’t. They aren’t sent here on a cloak-and-dagger mission, this is supposed to be low profile: even a hostage situation’s deemed undesirable by their superiors. Get on and stop the freight train and retrieve the cargo. Nice and easy, quick too.

Widowmaker furrows her brows and repeats the order they’ve received, “No casualties.”

He barks out a depreciating laugh, bitter and hollow, mutters “Collateral. Shit happens.”

Her tongue darts out to skim over the seal of her mouth, teeth raking over her bottom lip, both now wet. She suspects Reaper would’ve acted out on his own regardless her position if his situation really is that dire, but he now offers her a chance to become.. His accomplice? Some part within her seems excited at the prospect of conscious subordination, but it wasn’t there in the first place. Her sole purpose within Talon is to obey orders. Widowmaker finds herself greedy, hyperaware of her own wants and desires, wants and desires she’s never had before Amélie’s memories reappeared.

Noticing her hesitation, he wheedles darkly, “Besides, don’t you want to get back at our superiors for Egypt? Wouldn’t revenge feel good?”

Paraphrase of her own words. She chuckles darkly, considering him a vieux rénard in silence. There’s a vision of an elderly woman, silver-haired, more wrinkles than a sour apple, a pastel-colored dress, the background striking her as something one would see in an impressionist painting; unfocused, shapes and colors blending together. Her own hand is small, childlike. Amélie’s youth, then. The elderly woman’s supposedly her grandmother, folding those little fingers shut over the glossy bone-white beads of a rosary. Communion’s cross heavy around her neck. Widowmaker doesn’t understand the importance of this memory or why it pops up now. She looks at Reaper, encroached by the factory’s heavy-cloaked darkness.

If there are any bargains to be made, they’ll be on her terms. It stopped being about waltzing, it wasn’t even about waltzing in the first place. Breath rushes through her nostrils in exhale.

“You teach me first, right here, right now.” She demands as she pulls the cleaning rod out of the barrel and crosses one leg over the other.

Reaper leans forwards, forearm pressed against his knee and replies, “And you help me after. Deal?”

“Bon, we’re better safe than sorry, if they ask.” And their superiors will ask, she’s certain, but it’s an afterthought, a consequence no more grave than the light sting of your knuckles when you punch a fist against a wall.

Her own thoughts should worry her, but even this observation isn’t more than the cut of a dull blade.

Nothing more needs to be said. Widowmaker finishes up and reassembles her rifle, shuts the cleaning kit and disposes herself of the used cotton wads. Her shoulders are squared, her gaze sharp when she watches him rise up from his spot. His footfalls echo throughout the production line area, contained within the walls and the high ceiling.

His hand’s heavier on the small of her back than it was back then, gauntleted, armored. She subconsciously lifts her chin and refuses to be taken aback by how close his mask is to her face. There are eyes everywhere behind that mask, rows and rows of red eyes. Her heart might as well have been a jackhammer in her chest, thudding slowly but surely against the bars of her ribcage. There’s no better drumming song to dance to, she muses as she allows him to take her hand.

“Just follow my lead.”

.  

Chapter Text

.  

The clicks of her heels on the tiles of the corridor bounce within the walls and the low ceiling; the sound arching further down the darkness, and then inevitably disappears when she comes to a sudden halt. There’s a pale green light coming from an open doorway at the end of the hallway, serrated by the silhouette of someone slouched against the door frame. Widowmaker tilts her head and arches an eyebrow, with the corner of her mouth tilted upwards in an amused smirk. She makes an effort of moving more quietly, slinking through the corridor on dainty feet.

Her gaze falls on the unconscious guard for a brief moment. His profile is illuminated by the light coming from inside the room, glossing his black helmet over with a greenish patina, and his pistol is still in the holster strapped to his thigh, indicating that he either didn’t see or didn’t expect his attacker to come at him. She doesn’t bother pressing her fingertips to his neck to check if there’s still a heartbeat, only steps over his outstretched legs and enters the room.

Multiple holographic screens are pulled up with lines of binary code running vertically down the expanse of them. One screen’s blank, safe for a small blinking call button on the bottom. Otherwise the corners of the room are kept in the shadows, contrasted with the light from the screens, they are darker than they usually are. Reaper stands dead-center, with his broad back to her, muttering about something in Spanish. She looks from him to the numeral lock next to the door and finds that the display screen’s blue.

He doesn’t have the access code to this room.

Widowmaker was taking a walk to keep her mind off the test results of her biomedical checkup a day ago, but the corridor felt so constricting, like death row and she was the woman walking towards the chair. Sometimes flashes of Amélie’s reconditioning appear when she’s scheduled for rest; a masked man slapping her in the face whenever she said who she was, the sensation of freezing water in her nostrils, the cavern of her mouth, and her esophagus, the man squeezing her forearm for a vein to stick the syringe into, or the food she begged him for that he finally gave her when she repeated him word for word.

It would be different this time around; less breaking down, more breaking in. Taking away whatever—whoever she made of herself again.

And now she faces the very realistic possibility that Reaper’s going to double-cross Talon and leave. She swallows reflexively, silently, in an effort to squash the anger rising up her chest. At a guess, he’s uploading as much of the encrypted data Talon has stored on its main servers as possible to whoever’s on the other end of that voice call, but an estimate of how many terabytes that would be is impossible. Her hand automatically clenches into a hard fist.

Reaper casts a glance over his shoulder when the stampede of her heels echoes throughout the room as she dashes towards him. There’s no time for him to react as she launches herself at him, uses his arm as a balancing point and hooks both her knees around his neck to flip him over to the floor. He collides with the ground harshly, a dull smack and a grunt muffled by the inside of his mask; the person he was videocalling grits something out in Spanish, calls him Gabriel a few times and then disconnects. It was a woman’s voice and lightly altered by autotuning.

They’re both on the ground, on their sides, and she’s trying to keep one leg wrapped around his neck to maintain an advantage over him. Her right side of the body aches from the collision, especially the joint of her elbow and her hipbone. Her breathing’s ragged, from the fall, the strain and the anger.  

“Traitor.” Widowmaker hisses, when he lashes out with the back of his left arm at her and she tries to choke him harder, clenching the muscles in her thigh and calf. “Traitor.” Accent laces the word, makes the ‘r’s roll off her tongue.

He slams the spikes on the knuckles of his gauntlet against her shin and she yelps more in shock than in pain, but she tries to hold steadfast. His body turns into thick wisps of smoke, floating through the holographic screens; once more the persistent flapping of bird wings in the air, the cawing of crows as heard from a considerable distance, the outline of his mask like an owl’s head. Widowmaker rolls over on her stomach and pushes herself up on her feet.

“And here I thought you stopped being Talon’s little lapdog.” Reaper drawls as he solidifies again, his heavy footfalls audible when he paces predatorily now, the tail of his coat billowing around his calves. His voice is scathing when he continues, “I’m not a formal part of this organization, Widow.”

She adapts a fighting stance, legs slightly spread, arms up in front of her, her full attention turned on him to anticipate his next move. Her chest feels too constrictive and her rage stretches her so thin she’s airtight, this kind of fire blazes her to ashes from the inside. But there’s something underneath all that anger, something equally—if not more frightening in its intensity: the realization she’s angry because he will abandon her. Her eyes narrow when Reaper deliberately puts all his weight into one step; the sound reverberates within her ribcage.

“You wanna scrap?” He prompts, as the holographic screens flicker around his torso, highlighting the cartridges strapped over his chest and the gaunt cheekbones of his mask.

Her only response is an indignant huff; her eyes are gleaming wetly in the darkness, the skin of her face, sternum and clavicle a pale blue color underneath the lights of the multiple screens, and she slides the sole of her left foot flatly over the tiles of the floor to adjust her stance. Reaper stalks over to her, his movements fluid like liquid mercury, from the roll of his shoulders to the controlled pace of his footsteps.

He lunges for her with his right fist, but she deflects, grabs onto the fabric of his coat for leverage and jams her foot against his thigh, tries again for his kneecap, but gets the wind knocked out of her when he presses the spiked knuckles of his left fist into her stomach. Widowmaker stumbles backwards, out of balance, trying to control her breathing. Her flesh wasn’t punctured, but there’s a noticeable indent of his spikes in her skin and it’s going to leave a nasty dark bruise. Reaper pushes onwards, but instead of going at her with his fists again, he backhands her with the joint of his wrist against her jaw, sending her staggering and slumping sideways against the wall.

“Sloppy.” He comments as the warped shadow of his silhouette looms over the floor and touches the tips of her boots.

She wipes her palm over the sore hinge of her jaw, glances at the ceiling, dabs her tongue against the corners of her open mouth and then chuckles darkly. Rebuffs him in one sentence, “We’re just getting started, mon chèr.”

Her grappling hook darts out towards the low-hanging bars of light and the claw clenches shut around the steel beams holding them upright horizontally. She whips the sturdy cord a few times around her forearm, sets her right foot against the wall and tugs hard, so she’s sent flying. Widowmaker drives her kneecap into his mask, forcing him to take two steps backwards.

With one smooth movement of her arm, her grappling hook opens up again, the chord retracts and for a split second she allows herself to fall back first to the floor. Instead she spreads her legs, hooks her knees against the back of his shoulders, clenches the muscles in her thighs against his neck and holds herself suspended against him, her hair sprawling out from under her head.

His hands reach out for her thighs but just as he’s about to sink his claws into the meat of them, she twists her torso and topples him over onto the hard tiles, while she lands somewhat unsteadily on her feet. Widowmaker presses her heel down onto his left wrist and settles her other foot onto the flat of his chest, bending over to look down at him.

Reaper laughs, but his voice sounds raspy, out of breath, while his chest is heaving underneath the sole of her foot. His eyes are obscured by the black gauze in his mask, but she imagines his pupils must be blown wide, contrasting the sickly white of the cornea. Shadowy tendrils slip upwards around her ankle while her foot seems to sink through the bars of his ribcage into his lungs. Her smug expression falls when he dissolves into a mass of shadows, forcing her to take a step forwards to reestablish her balance, and materializes behind her.

Clawed fingers grab onto her ponytail and yank her backwards by her hair with one firm tug. He keeps one leg outstretched to trip her up and abruptly lets go as she goes staggering, but he moves faster than she could anticipate and grips her by the throat, sending her crashing down onto her back with a loud smack. Her bones rattle in her body, her spine and shoulder blades ache. She feels the sharpened tips of his gauntleted fingers dip into the back of her neck. Her nostrils are flared, her eyes big and bright underneath the light of the holographic screens. Reaper sits crouched on one knee above her, holding her down with the flat of his palm.

Widowmaker gasps and holds onto his wrist with both of her hands, mouth open. He doesn’t push down harder, but tilts his head to the right as if considering her. She dares to stroke the outline of the shotgun strapped to his left thigh from underneath his coat with the inside of her right foot, not knowing whether she has eye contact with him but trying to hold it all the same.

“You could’ve shot me from the start, but you didn’t.” She rasps out in a shaky voice, wondering if he can feel the tremors raking over her throat, can feel it when she swallows reflexively.

He replies gruffly, “No.. I didn’t.”

“Why?”—Her mind’s reeling with the possible answers he could give her and she finds herself dreading silence the most out of all of them, but she has to stay focused.  

Her grip on his wrist tightens, brows furrowed together, her lips slightly apart as she breathes in, and out again, hypersensitive to the pressure of his palm on the column of her throat.

“You still have my back, don’t you?” Reaper asks as he drags his thumb up and down the side of her neck, over her pulsepoint, the claw a gentle threat almost.

She bucks her hips upwards, slams her left knee up against his chest and presses her right calf against the side of his face to shove him off her. His face trapped between the underside of her upper leg and her calf, his body slumped on the floor, the arm he was choking her with trapped between her legs, hand in her hands.

“Do you have mine?” Her question seems to ring throughout the entire room, too silent all of a sudden without her ragged breathing and the cadence of her heartbeat in between her ears.

Reaper doesn’t reply her outright, no, but his free hand comes to rest atop her kneecap, slides down the rigid line of her shin. “Go get your rifle and helmet. Change of patrol’s at 2:40 and I want us out of here long before that.”

.

It’s drizzling outside; the kind of rain that’s just pinstripes underneath the glaring spotlights positioned in every corner of the square, the kind of rain that simply persists throughout the entire night. This particular base was an impromptu supply camp during the first Omnic Crisis and its outline is comprised of a large hangar built out of cheap concrete that takes up the right side of the square, a data center Talon expanded on underground and a control post with road barriers at the entrance.

Widowmaker sees the blurry shape of the guard traversing the square to the side gate of the hangar and two more guards in the small cabin of the control post through the infrared cameras of her helmet. She hears the rustle of Reaper’s coat when he shifts impatiently next to her. There are three military-styled trucks parked in the hangar; one’s up for repair with a broken down engine, but the other two have been repaired and their control systems updated. It’s their best shot at getting an easy way out of here.

“Patrol at five. Just one.” She informs him in a whisper.

He gives her a grunt in reply and closes his eyes behind his mask. From memory, he recalls the side entrance of the hangar and teleports away in a swirl of purplish black shadows. His sudden appearance draws a loud gasp from the guard, an intake of breath that gets cut off when he hooks an elbow around his neck and flexes his muscles. Wheezing sounds well up from down the man’s throat, followed by a couple of hollow smacks when the guard instinctively starts to thump his fists against his forearm. Reaper doesn’t even feel him trying to stomp his heel against his shin with the metal covering his boots.

It doesn’t take long for the guard to stop struggling; for the muscles in his body to go slack and it’s only the vice-grip Reaper has on his neck that keeps him upright all together. His black helmet and uniform are glossy from the rain, the Talon insignia drenched to the threads, and his head lolls forwards with his chin bumping against his chest when Reaper drags him inside the hangar and leaves him slumped against a crate. It’s completely dark, aside from the lighting falling inside from the open doorway and the frosted glass windows.

The electric switch for the roller-down gate of the hangar’s in the upper left corner, above the various light switches for the rows and rows of fluorescent tubes attached to the tiled ceiling. Reaper stalks over to the truck parked in front of the gate, his footfalls harsh in the absolute silence of the hangar, and tests if the door of the driver’s side is unlocked. There’s a curt click and the light of the truck’s cabin flashes a dimmed orange. He casts a glance over his shoulder when he hears the claw of Widowmaker’s grappling hook grab onto the lantern above the hangar’s side exit door, followed by the zip of the rope retracting, her landing and the telltale tap-tap-tap of her heels on the floor. Her helmet’s infrared cameras glow an eerie red in the darkness.

She makes a beeline for the passenger’s seat and says in lieu of greeting, “Keys are in the glove compartment.” Her sentence’s punctuated by her slamming the door shut when she’s seated.

Reaper snorts and slides into the driver’s seat. He studies the various display screens of the tracking and electronic communication systems on the dashboard for a brief moment before whipping out the shotgun strapped to his right thigh and pressing the barrel point blank to the front of the installation. Widowmaker doesn’t even flinch when he fires three times and positions her own rifle between her leg and the cabin door. Above their heads, the orange light flickers on and off unsteadily. She shifts the retractable plates of her helmet away from her eyes.

“Give me the keys.” He demands, placing his shotgun on his lap and holding out his hand.

“There’s something else we should take care of first..” She says matter-of-fact, looking down at her tattooed forearm. Her jaw’s still a bit sore.

He exhales through his nostrils, exasperated, but keeps quiet otherwise. Something she’s oddly grateful for as the memory comes to her, but in crude, rudimentary fragments. Her arm pumped full of anesthetics, the blade of the scalpel pressing into the skin of her forearm, the set of tweezers with a microchip, the septic smell of the bland room, and the doctor’s facemask a bluish green fitting nicely with the sickly pale skin of his face under the fluorescent lights; she remembers these instances, but not how they come together, they’re just separate sets jumbled apart.

Widomaker shows him her forearm and brings the tip of her forefinger to the bottom curve of the ‘o’ in her tattoo. She looks at him with half-hooded eyes and murmurs in explanation, “They chipped me. Best we get rid of it.”

There’s no other response except for a scoff. She watches the orange glow fall over the cheek bones of his skull mask as he reaches out with both of his hands, and braces herself when the tips of his claws burrow into her skin. Her brows are arched and a hiss escapes between her gritted teeth when they sink even deeper into her flesh. Reaper pinches his claws together, pulls and tears out some skin. Blood drips down to her wrist. She rushes the air through her nostrils in exhale as he cracks the chip between his claws. The tattoo on her forearm’s messed up, whatnot with a chunk of flesh missing, but aside from the sharp pain, she also experiences relief.

“Check the glove compartment for a rag or something to bandage your arm with.” Reaper orders gruffly, still holding onto her arm with one palm.

Her heart doesn’t pump blood nearly as fast as a regular human’s heart so she isn’t worried about the blood loss, but for the gash to heal properly, it’d be best if she dresses it right. He lets go of her arm so she can pop open the glove compartment, but the only things inside are the set of keys, a mechanic’s tablet and a screwdriver.

“No such luck.” Widowmaker comments idly as she snatches the keys and hands them to him. Some blood drips into her lap, but the edge of the sting is already gone. Now the ache’s comparable to the one of her stomach, her shin, her jaw, the rest of her body.

She sinks further into the cushion of the seat when he ignites the engine and turns on the headlights. The rumble of the engine seems to reverberate throughout the entire cabin of the truck, and rumbles onwards throughout her chest.

Reaper presses the button to roll down his window and grabs onto his shotgun again, cocking the barrel in the direction of the electronic switch of the shutter gate. He tilts his head to regard her again, asking, “You still a decent shot?”

The look she levels him tells him everything there’s to know and he blows the switch off the wall. With a start, the shutters of the gate clatter as they roll upwards and exposes the inner square of the basis. She turns her cheek against the backrest of the seat when he hits the gas and brings the truck flying forwards on its hover wheels, watching the movement of his fist in his lap, still holding onto his shotgun.

“Subtle.” She chides him playfully, but her roughened-up voice throws off the effect.

He chuckles darkly as he drives up the speed and comes barreling towards the control post with its road barriers. His response is to the point, “But effective.”

One guard storms outside, waving around his machine gun and shouting loudly, bombarded by the headlights of the truck and the large spotlights surrounding the square. His uniform bleak in the silver white glow and the rain. Reaper leans his elbow on the window frame of the cabin door, aims for the guard’s torso and empties his shotgun in five rapid bursts. He throws the weapon away afterwards, both hands on the wheel, foot stuck to the gas and Widowmaker braces herself for the impact when he rams the front of the truck into the road barriers.

Sirens start to blare, the lights in the small control post are switched on, the wooden beams ricochet and break apart, parts of the road barriers crash against the front window and one large chunk knocks off the mirror on the passenger’s side. Crisp evening air hits her face-first when her window’s rolled down.

“Take ‘em out, Widow.” Reaper bristles as he tries to hold the steering wheel straight and makes the truck pick up speed again.

Automatically, her hand darts out for her rifle and within a second or three, she’s repositioned herself with her kneecaps pressed against the door, half-leaning outside of the window with the stock of her gun propped against her shoulder. She spots the guard running away towards the data center through her scope, a figure in black covered in harsh lighting. Her finger twitches reflexively as she lines up her shot. In between breaths, she finishes him off with a decapitating shot between his shoulder blades. Back into the cabin, rifle between her knee and the door, Widowmaker presses her palm to the wound on her forearm and leans her head back against the headrest of the seat. Exhaustion overwhelms her.

Her fingertips are trembling; she’s free, and then the gravity of the situation hitting her like a freight train, what’s next. As if the action of breaking through that roadblock wasn’t more challenging than taking a bite from an apple, but leaves her alone with the understanding of a god. She observes Reaper from the corner of her eyes. Purpose came to her in the form of orders, targets, missions and specified objectives, but now she’s slipped away from the choke chain Talon put around her neck. Her eyelids start to droop and the ruined dashboard flicks to black once or twice.

Reaper mumbles something that sounds like stay awake, but it comes from a faraway place, as if he is no longer sitting right next to her. She jolts up when his claws dig into her upper arm in a tease. There’s a brief moment where she glares at his reflection in the glass of the front window, but he only shakes his head and turns on the radio. His bullets might’ve taken out most of the electronics inside the cabin, but the radio seems to be working, albeit shakily; a lot of static, a distorted announcer’s voice. He huffs angrily and slams his fist down onto the top of the dashboard. Widowmaker chuckles softly, pulling up her legs against her chest and rolling over onto her side. Her rifle falls to the side.

He finally finds a channel that doesn’t churn out static and the announcer’s voice sounds crisp, cheerful, speaking amicably in Spanish. Her understanding of what’s being said on the radio is muddled, but she picks out that the singer is called Marvin Gaye and that they’re going to play Heard It Through The Grapevine. One drum shot serves as the intro, followed up quickly by an electric-piano riff. She takes a steadying breath.

“Focus on the music.” He advises her as he takes a sharp left and leaves the back of the truck careening right. They should be on the abandoned highway to Toledo now.

It’s difficult but she tries to keep her attention directed at the road ahead of them, lit up by the large headlights of the truck as is the rain falling down. Some worn down billboard warns them about the dangers of canker sores, complete by the image of an ulcer on the inside of someone’s bottom lip. Stain of mauve on darkened pink. Meanwhile a female vocalist tuned in as backup on the song. There are other noises that her ears pick up; the shifting of her rifle’s stock onto the carpeting, the steam exhaust through the hover wheels and the creaking of the leather of Reaper’s gauntlets when he holds onto the steering wheel tighter.

She voices her thoughts alone, “Et maintenant? What will we do next?”

Her chest constricts at the thought that Reaper might simply dispose of her somewhere in the Spanish wastelands, getting rid of the deadweight. She trailed after him blindly on the basis of some.. what?—some hunch that he might take her to where she wanted to go, even if she didn’t know what that place was exactly. Still doesn’t. All that remains are the words he spoke to her earlier. They have each other’s backs.

“I’ve got a list.” His gruff voice cuts through the companionable atmosphere in the truck cabin, undermines the smooth beat of the song. “I intend to finish it.”

Widowmaker feels the blood soak through her glove and grimaces begrudgingly, murmuring, “Suppose I will help you, mon chèr.”

“Heh, I wonder… Why pick a fight that isn’t yours?” Reaper asks as he taps his claws on the steering wheel. They underscore the dying piano of the song.

She keeps her eyes trained on the tattered asphalt of the highway that the government didn’t bother to repair after the first Omnic Crisis hit the countryside big. Doesn’t have to look at him to know she’s carrying the full weight of his gaze. Her forearm stings under the pressure of her fingers.

“Moi-même.” It’s a whisper at first, then she repeats herself louder and in English. “I do it for me. It’s the first choice I could make as myself, not Widowmaker but... Enfin” She ends with a dark chuckle and tilts her head to look at him.

Reaper seems to blend into the darkness seamlessly, aside from the white accents of his outfit and his mask, now washed out in a toneless gray color thanks to the lack of light inside the cabin. Behind the dark gauze in the eyeholes of his mask, she wonders if his eyes are regarding her or the road stretching onwards in front of them. His claws gleam ominously in the shadows and she can feel them digging through her skin again, pulling and tearing. She heaves out a sigh.

“You’re no help banged up as you are right now.” He eventually says as the Spanish announcer blabs on about the next song. Everything is white noise on the backdrop when he speaks. “Let’s see if there’s a rest stop somewhere.”

Her eyelids are so heavy. Would he be so disgruntled if she took a little powernap? Her posture drops and her cheek sags down the backrest of the seat. Exhaustion has her by the back of her neck, reducing her legs to weightlessness.

“Hey.” Reaper says loudly, snatching her sleepiness away from her with one word. “Focus on the music. Stay with me.”

Rifle bumps against the cushion of the seat with a hollow thunk and she groggily sits up straighter again. She groans and grits out, “I’ll try.”

.

It’s barely dawn when they come across a rundown diner at the outskirts of Toledo with faded letters on the façade and a couple of outdated gas pumps on the right side and it stopped raining. There’s one beat-up car on the small parking lot at the front. One of the three street lights is broken, the plastic that’s supposed to be encasing the lamp’s shattered onto the ground, and there’s a string of lightbulbs tied between the lanterns, but they aren’t working either.

Reaper kills the engine of the truck and tells her to pack up and get out. There’s sand everywhere, from the concrete of the parking lot to the horizon in the far distance where the sun’s coming up. Bushes and scrubs and a few trees complete the desert-like scenery. He slams the door of the truck cabin shut and takes only the mechanic’s tablet with him, leaves the key in the ignition.

Her glove’s soaked through and there are some bloodstains on her lap as well, but she soldiers on as if there’s nothing wrong at all, striding over towards the double-doors of the diner with her rifle strapped to her back. There are lights on inside, indicating that there’s at least someone present. Reaper blows the cameras positioned above the entrance off the wall with his shotguns and stalks after her. They clatter to the ground aimlessly and break further apart on impact, strewing around pieces of glass and white plastic.

Music comes from the large television screen in the corner of the room, languid guitars and soft percussion, and the smell of cleaner hanging heavily in the air, but the beige tiles of the floor are covered in all sorts of sauce stains, dirty. There’s a woman in a yellow uniform shirt and a red apron behind the counter, her auburn-dyed hair hanging limply around her shoulders and her cheeks dusted with a generous amount of blush. She’s standing behind the glass display case with the tarta de queso and miguelitos, clutching a broomstick against her chest as if it’s her last line of defense.

Widowmaker doesn’t react when Reaper kills the woman off with one clean shot and makes his way around the counter and then through the swing door leading to the kitchen. His coattails billowing around his calves as he disappears. After a short while, during which she sat down in one of the booths with her rifle propped against the cushion next to her, he returns with a battered first aid kit and a bottle of water. He clicks open the kit with two curt clicks and takes out a small tube of antiseptic cream and a roll of bandages as she’s greedily finishing off the bottle with rivulets of water sliding down the corners of her mouth and chin.

“Hold out your arm.” He demands as he unscrews the cap on the tube with the tips of his claws.

She takes the tube from him instead and covers the wound with the antiseptic cream, biting her bottom lip because it stings like she imagines her venom mines do. Meanwhile he rips off the plastic tape around the roll of bandages and throws it away between the seat and the table. There’s a salt and pepper shaker on the table, a bottle of tabasco sauce and a menu cart wedged between the two. Her stomach shrivels up at the thought of food.

Once she’s dressed her forearm tight with bandages, she pushes herself up from her seat and walks over to the display case with sweets, aware but uncaring of Reaper’s gaze on her back, bare from the design of her bodysuit. Behind the counter, the corpse of the woman lies on the floor with the broomstick rolled over from her open hand, unblinking and dry eyes left to stare up at the ceiling. Widowmaker picks up a miguelito, but as she wants to take a bite, Reaper interrupts her.

“You don’t have a sweet tooth.” It sounds so matter-of-fact that she sinks her teeth into the pastry just to spite him.

He was right, but she finishes it anyway, grimacing when a couple of crumbs fall down onto the counter. Tastes awful, stale from being out in the glass display for the entire night, untouched. But it doesn’t stop her from reaching for a slice of tarta de queso and promptly devouring it too.

“What’s our next stop?” Widomaker asks of him when she’s done, elbows propped onto the counter, head tilted so she can watch him from over her shoulder.

“Owe a favor from some guy in Madrid. We’ll keep our heads low for the first couple of days, to shake Talon off our trail. Afterwards, well.” He puts the tablet flat onto the tabletop and projects the holographic screen upwards. Names and names are projected in neat rows.

She drops her head between her hands and chuckles, finishing the sentence for him. “You got a list. And we better finish it, right?”

His guffaw is rough, kind of like the howl of the wind at Cap Gris-Nez, unfettered even by his mask. Her gaze travels from the fridge with sodas behind the counter to the cross hanging above the swinging door of the kitchen. She hears him stand up and walk, how his heavy footfalls overshadow the soft percussion of the music and how the billow of his coattails accentuate his movement. Reaper’s like a big black panther on the prowl, sometimes; a predator that would put the entire world inside his maw and crunch it between his teeth.

Her rifle’s placed on the counter in front of her, next to the cash register and the glass display.

“Let’s win, baby.” He tells her and a tingle runs down her spine, as if he’d stripped the skin off the vertebrae just to touch her there.

Widowmaker scoffs at him, but runs her fingertips over the long barrel of her rifle, over the body and the stock of it. This weapon is an extension of herself now. He wraiths over to the dead woman behind the counter and remains floating above her as shadowy tendrils extend over her face, her wrists, her ankles, starting to dissolve the composition of her form cell per cell. Regenerates at her expense so he can survive the next couple of days under the radar. The first time she saw him do this, she was intrigued by his modus operandi—so much like a vulture, but she’s gotten used to it, to him, at this point. Her thumb brushes sideways over the trigger of her rifle.

There’s a smirk playing around the corners of her mouth; it’s always a story about a woman, a darkness and an instinctual understanding of the world, isn’t it? Hers comes with the knowledge that if she could grasp the entire world in the palm of her hand, she’d give it to him and watch how he tears it to pieces.

.

Chapter Text

.

It’s a quiet neighborhood where the guy who owes Reaper a favor lives; it’s closer to the airport than the center of Madrid anyway, with a block of service flats where the omnic community is concentrated and with two or three stores: an electronics and hardware shop, a grocery store and a pharmacy. The guy’s name is Luis, and he’s a Chilean who used to work for Overwatch’ R&D department but got dishonorably discharged on the account of unethical practices. He owns the electronics and hardware shop, and doesn’t seem too surprised on seeing Reaper, unmasked but fully armed as they entered.

“I always knew you’d come, Reyes. Don’t even got the decency to stay dead,” he said in Spanish as he regarded them from behind the counter.

They’re staying in the guestroom of the apartment above the electronics and hardware shop, planning their next move. One wall serves as a blank screen for the beamer and reflects a collection of article outlines and abstracts. Paragraphs of text are neatly dispersed all over the right side of the room, interrupted only by a blueprint or a photograph. There’s a bed on the opposite side, single, that she sleeps in at night. Reaper doesn’t sleep. Otherwise the room is sparsely furnished: a wardrobe, a desk with the beamer and a small ancillary table cluttered with two tablets and a burner phone.

One name is written down in red chalk near the ceiling: Aleksay Danielewicz. He’s a former UN representative from Poland and the brother of the EU commissioner from whose computer they stole the data in Brussels. A collage of pictures shows him slowly aging; from an energetic forty year-old shaking hands with various diplomats, military commanders and Overwatch members to a withered old man who avoids the public sphere like the plague. He was one of the deciding factors during the vote on who to elect as strike-commander for Overwatch. He’d also lobbied extensively for Jack Morrison’s promotion.

Widowmaker sits on the edge of the bed, tinkering with the prototype for a new venom mine she could use in the field. Luis had promised her to take a look at the ones she was still carrying to see if he was able to recreate them. The hemline of the oversized shirt comes to halfway her thighs now, but if she’s standing upright, it almost reaches to her knees. Her hair isn’t in a ponytail for once and falls loosely around her shoulders onto the mattress. She’s not used to this kind of freedom, away from her tight-fitting bodysuit and her knee-high boots. Her fingertips idly tap against the plexiglass case of the venom mine.

She looks up when the door to the guestroom is pushed open. Reaper comes in, busy with his tablet, and walks over to the other side of the bed. His skin is starting to show signs of decay, but all in all he still looks human. The mattress dips under his weight.

“Sombra contacted me,” he mutters as he shifts so his back thuds dully against the wooden headboard of the bed, feet propped on the mattress, lying down comfortably.

Her gaze falls over her shoulder, onto his legs, upwards to his torso and finally his face. He still has a nose, so he doesn’t need to regenerate within the first five days. The blue light of the holographic screen reflects in his dark eyes.

“Oh?” She puts the venom mine down next to her and half-turns towards him. Strands of hair come sliding down her cheek. She fusses with her hair and continues, “And? What did she manage to decrypt?”

It’s sunny outside and the light comes streaming in through the large and only window of the room, warming the floorboards. Her feet remain cold, but it’s a nice sensation, nonetheless. Reaper tilts his head and regards her. His dark skin tone contrasts nicely with the plain white shirt Luis gave him to wear. From her perspective, he looks relaxed, almost. Not exactly how he used to be as Gabriel Reyes, but bordering on.

Simultaneously more and less of a ghost.

Her lips curve into a small smile and she doesn’t know why.

Reaper quirks a brow, huffs and shakes his head, eventually turning his attention back to the tablet. Outside, a dog starts to bark loudly and the roar of an engine as a car accelerates overshadows the continuous barking for a brief moment. Such common sounds pull at the threads of memory in her mind. There was a dog barking loudly when she moved into Gérard’s apartment and they were struggling with the cardboard boxes on the narrow stairwell.

Gérard was laughing about something. His cologne, that he dabbed to the side of his neck and wrist, mixes with the smell of smoke from the two cigarettes he had outside. She knows the curtains in the apartment will smell like cigarettes too if she allows him to keep smoking inside. The steps of the stairs are steep and the iron railing needs a new paintjob, but the location of the building is just perfect, right in the historical heart of the city. Some dog starts to bark angrily from the sidewalk. Her belly’s stuffed with butterflies. Moving in with your boyfriend is a big step, her mother had told her over dinner one evening, but in a tone of voice that belied how excited she really was for her.

“Hey,” he says loudly, shaking her from her thoughts, “you’re spacing out, Widow.”

Her fingers clench together, grabbing at the fitted sheet. She takes a steadying breath, closes her eyes to drown out the echoes of the memory. It’s quiet outside again, and the golden sunlight touches her blue toes and gilds the plain parquet of the floor.

“I’m in control,” she reassures him coldly as her eyelids flutter back open.

They stare at each other for a brief moment and she watches how the corners of his mouth twitch up into a sly smirk. He moves slightly, propping himself upright against the headboard so there’s some more space and places the tablet flatly on his lap. Luis gave him a pair of black sweatpants to wear and the pant legs are too short; the elastic bunches up around his muscular calves.

“Sombra got the drop on Danielewicz. Sent me satellite pics of his location,” he explains as he slides his forefinger over the flat screen and accesses his downloads, and his eyes search hers again as he continues, “come look at your new target.”

Widowmaker languidly moves so she’s lying next to him, on her side, her elbow propped onto the pillow and her knuckles underneath her chin. Her forearm brushes against his bicep, but the low temperature of her skin doesn’t seem to deter him. He angles the screen of the tablet so she can better see what’s on the pictures. Her knees bump against the side of his leg as she draws them up.

It’s a bird’s eye view of a coastline and despite the shaky quality of the images, it’s easy to make out the roof of a beach house, a blue rectangle that can only be a pool, and the outline of a driveway. Reaper swipes to the next picture. It depicts the same coastline but from a greater distance, showing how the sometimes rocky landscape brackets the jagged sandy beaches. There are more mansions dotting the seashore and at the edge of the picture, a city with its apartment buildings form neat white blocks.

She tilts her head to look away from the screen and asks in a serious voice, “Where were these taken?”

“Crastos in the Algarves, south of Portugal,” Reaper answers as he swipes through a few more pictures.

This includes a blurry frontal view of  Danielewicz’ beach house that she suspects Sombra stole from the Portuguese coastguard’s databank. It was undoubtedly taken from a ship at sea.

They’ve got some planning to do, then: if they want to continue keeping a low profile for the time being, they’ll have to make the trip by car, which means they’ll have to pass the tollbooth discretely or take a more complicated route. Better pack enough cash, ammo, food and drinks. Luis also better hurry up on modifying her venom mines.

Then there’s the issue of recon, they’ll need to do a quick survey of the premises to check where the cameras are located, possible blind spots, if there’s a vantage point for sniping, other security measures employed, etcetera. Widowmaker hauls a hand through her hair and mulls everything over in her head, then presses her cheek against her knuckles and observes his profile.

“We’ll have to leave fast if we don’t want you to arouse any suspicion,” she muses out loud, “unless you want to drive with your mask on?”

Reaper snorts and mutters irritably, “the faster we put the son of a bitch out of his misery, the better in my book.”

“You have a plan, I take it?” She prompts as she rolls over on her stomach. It’s a tight fit on the single mattress and she almost knocks the prototype off the bed.

He lifts his head to look at her, but his gaze lingers over her shapely legs and the cheap panties Luis bought for her to wear that are stretched over her behind, exposed now by how the shirt’s crept up around her waist. Desire doesn’t look unseemly on his features, she finds; his pupils are wider, gobbling up the brown of his irises, and air rushes through his nostrils in exhale.

“Somewhat—” his gaze finds her face again, torn away from her lower back and the curve of her spine, and he continues, “but first we need to get you some decent clothes. My mask might arouse suspicion, but you’re the one with a fucking cat suit and blue skin.”

.

Luis booked a cheap room for them online at a B&B near Crastos. They checked in at around four in the afternoon after an eight hour drive through a mostly dusty, desert-like landscape, carrying with them only two worn trunks and a straw beach bag slung over her shoulder.

You’ve brought a lot with you for a stay of three nights—, the receptionist, an elderly woman with a large mole on her chin, had quipped in a gravelly voice when they entered. There was a reed-woven basket with homemade treats on the white wooden counter and a dreamcatcher dangled from a hook in the wall next to the entrance, and when the receptionist opened the door to their room, it didn’t look a thing like the pictures on the website.

Widowmaker tugs at the neckline of the tight-fitting dress Luis got for her at an H&M on the Gran Via in Madrid, covering her arms and dragging on to past her knees. The punto di roma fabric would be stifling in this weather for any other human being, but she’s more concerned about the fact that it’s a size too small. The brim of her felt summer hat falls in front of her nose again and she huffs in exasperation.

“It’s not a bad disguise,” he says with a dark note of humor to his voice, amused at how apparent her annoyance is, “you look like a movie star.” Reaper has the audacity to grin at her, then.

She rolls her eyes and throws the hat onto the mattress of the queen-sized bed, tapping her foot impatiently as he stows both of the trunks away into the rickety wardrobe. They won’t be needing their guns for the preliminary recon, only her helmet to track the heat signatures of the target inside his beach house, a pair of binoculars and a print-out of the satellite pic to jot down the beach house’s surveillance measures. With a low thud, the double doors of the closet fall shut.

“I’m not sure what you’re supposed to look like,” Widowmaker mutters disdainfully as she turns and gazes outside the window.

They got a shitty view of the broad street: the small terraced houses with walled front yards all have sycamore trees that cast the shadows of their foliage over the sidewalk and there are a few cars parked along the curb. Two stray cats are lazily sleeking their fur with their raspy tongues in the shade of a vale green hornbeam, figuring as both a hedge and a closing.

Reaper chuckles darkly before pushing his aviator sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. His skin is starting to flake, slowly deteriorating to a sallow color. He answers gruffly, “like your husband.”

It might’ve been painful once, to that glimmer of Amélie underneath the cold shell of her exterior, but right now his words don’t evoke more than some sort of nostalgic wistfulness in her for something she’s never experienced as Widowmaker. She seizes him up through his reflection in the window glass and smirks despite herself. Gérard dressed much better than that. With a shake of the head, she eventually turns around and crosses her arms in front of her chest.

“Let’s get going then, mon petit chouchou,” she adds the ridiculous endearment solely to spite and judging by the snarl tugging on the corner of his mouth, she’s succeeded.

Reaper scoffs and hauls a hand through his mop of dark curls, muttering lowly, “don’t ever call me that again.”

Feigning a pout, Widowmaker then brushes past him to pick and place her hat on the crown of her head, adjusts the flappy brim and smoothens her ponytail over her left shoulder. Her sandals clack back against the balls of her feet when she walks and she can’t wait to switch back to her usual boots. Reaper follows her through the hallway, the sound of the soles of his espadrilles muffled by the carpet, and eventually comes to walk next to her when they’re at the small reception of the B&B.

“Is the lady going to go tanning on the beach?” The receptionist asks coyly in Portuguese from behind the counter, pretending to arrange the basket with treats just to have something to do with her hands, grinning at them like a cat who got to the canary.

Reaper seems to have understood what the old crone said, because he puts an arm snug around her waist and offers the receptionist a lopsided, somewhat cynical grin, going as far as to reply in accented Portuguese, “We’re going to work on it.”

One of the pastries she was holding, tumbles out of her grasp to the ground and she mutters something unintelligible under her breath, patting her lower back with both her hands before bending over to scoop it back up. Widowmaker narrows her eyes when she notices how some of the skin around his mouth furls up and flakes in between the hairs of his beard, thinking to herself that he should watch out.

Her hand comes to rest on the strap of her handbag over her elbow, fingers skittish enough to want to smoothen the skin of his chin.

It’s a fifteen minute walk to the shoreline and it takes another ten minutes to get close enough to private beach. There’s a large rock formation off the coast that might’ve been an excellent vantage point for her but it would be too tricky to get on top even with her grappling hook; it’s too far out in sea and the stones look slippery, covered with seaweed.

Some tourists are busy shaking the sand off their beach towels and rolling them up, clearing away their parasols and coolers. Two rowdy kids chase a Cocker Spaniel along the incoming waves, squealing and laughing loudly. Widowmaker surveys the seaside for a fleeting moment when Reaper bumps their elbows together and nudges towards a secluded spot in the dunes. It’s still a reasonable distance from the fence that separates the public beach from the private one.

Sand gets in her sandals and sticks to her soles. She puts her handbag on the ground, grabs her helmet, covered in a bright, multi-colored towel, unwraps it and hands both the towel and her hat to Reaper, who in turn spreads the towel out over the sand. She takes out the pair of binoculars, a pen and the print-out as well, gives them to him and settles down cross-legged on the towel. Her dress makes it difficult to sit comfortable, but she doesn’t care, just places her helmet on her head.

Reaper’s next to her on his haunches, observing the premises with the binoculars. After a moment or two, he places an ‘x’ on the print-out, mapping out the locations of the cameras. She takes note of the heat signatures inside. With a flick of the pen, he loops a circle around the upper right corner of the premises, between the driveway and the porch. There are fifteen red blurs bleeping across the area, three are concentrated still inside the bungalow, while the others are constantly moving.

“They have watch dogs,” she warns as she spots how erratic the five smaller blurs dart around.

He grunts in response, trying to balance the flimsy sheet of paper on his right leg. Eventually, he sinks down on one knee and draws a few more crosses along the corridor between the fence and the side of the beach house. Widowmaker takes off her helmet, brings her knees up against her chest and her chin on top of them, and stares off at the expanse of the private beach. She can spot four of the guards patrolling the shoreline with two guard hounds on a leash.

From here, she could pick them off one by one, until they discover her position and she’s forced to relocate. However, if the target doesn’t run outside to the beach, her role as support and the damage she does would be extremely limited. They’ll need to stake out at night to see when there’s a change of patrol, if there are less or more guards in general, and then decide on their plan of attack.

“Aleks’ outdone himself,” Reaper mutters irritably as he checks off the corner of the building, “CCTV cams, dogs and what looks like a turret hatch on his porch.”

She arches an eyebrow and angles her neck to glance at him, cheek to kneecap. Then, in a cool voice, she prompts cautiously, “domestic turrets, vraiment?”

“Ironclad doesn’t build any fucking sprinkler systems,” he retorts briskly as he picks at the shaven side of his head.

Widowmaker scrunches her nose when he picks a clump of skin and short-shaven hair loose from behind his ear and flicks it away into the sand. They assess each other for a fleeting moment, before wordlessly moving to get up and put their things away again. He rolls up and tucks the towel under his armpit, and then comes to stand close to her as she settles the strap of the handbag over her shoulder. Her hat’s back on her head again, but the brim is askew. She only stares up at him as he adjusts it so he can see her face clearly.

“Com’on, let’s see if we can go ‘round,” Reaper mumbles as he puts on his pair of sunglasses and trudges onwards, with his feet sinking further down the sand every step he takes.

.

It all starts out according to plan: she blows the cameras off their perches on top of the front gates from a sturdy sycamore branch while Reaper teleports onto the driveway to pick off the rest of them. Her grappling hook darts out and catches onto the railing of the balcony above the entry of the beach house. With one quick pull, she’s catapulted over the straight, narrow pins on top of the gateway; her body twisted like a cat lunging midair for prey and her long ponytail brought to her back like a whip a couple of times.

There’s a cacophony of sounds, ranging from the staccato gunfire of Reaper’s shotguns, the panicked shouting of the guards, barking, and then the sirens of the alarm. She lands on both feet, pulls her weapon from her back and clicks on the automatic mode of her rifle. Gunshots ring throughout the sweltering evening air.

One of the guard dogs goes down on its haunches, squirming and shuddering, before collapsing on its side, dead, its fur glossy with blood. Widowmaker swerves around on her heels when the turret hatches creak loudly and open up, their metal jaws retreating underneath the flowerbeds of larkspur and lavender while the cupola already comes to peek above the ground. Her gaze flits from the guard on her left, clutching a hand against his abdomen, slowly bleeding out, to the mass of shadows shrouding around the second turret.

Reaper’s going to take care of it— the thought, although fleeting, prompts her to snap the barrel of her rifle to the right and aim for the three guards stampeding towards them. She can’t hear the flapping of bird wings over the quick-paced and heavy footfalls, over the whirring of the turret systems, but she doesn’t have to. Her finger curves over the trigger, pulls; Widow Kiss’ spews a round of ten per second and the stock pushes back hard against her shoulder in recoil.

Behind her, the sensors of the first turret are beeping loudly as the twin barrels of the gun are locked onto Reaper. He’s made quick work of the second one, blowing apart the electronic wiring at the base of the body to disrupt its aiming module with two or three blasts of his shotguns.

“Widow, move it!— ” the outline of his frame blurs into smoke as he uses his wraith form to escape the downpour of bullets directed at him.

She knows his physical disappearance will cause the turret to reconfigure its target and in this position, she’s a sitting duck. Her feet move on their own accord; she’s halfway to the fence in a mad dash, when she turns mid-sprint and aims her grappling hook above the window on the second floor. The metal claw crunches through the white plaster. Bullets whistle past her ears when she’s pulled up and over the railing and onto the balcony.

Once again, Widowmaker feels like she’s bursting apart at the seams from the sense of being alive. Her heart thumps in her ribcage, slower than that of the average human being perhaps, but faster than what she’s used to. Bullets are sprayed in an unsteady line over the façade of the beach house, lodged into the plaster. Window glass lies shattered over the ground.

Her rifle’s switched back to sniper mode, with the scope jutted out above the body. It’s calibrating its damage potential. Seconds are decisive in a situation like this. At sixty percent she pulls the trigger and fires at one of the feet of the turret’s pedestal to upset its balance and disrupt its sensors. The twin barrels abruptly bump upwards as there’s smoke coming from the electronic wiring underneath the metal hatch. Reaper finishes the thing off with four more shotgun blasts.

They have to move fast. Local law enforcement’s bound to be incoming by now and it’s just a matter of time before the rest of Danielewicz’ pack of bodyguards tries to escort him off the premises. He doesn’t have a yacht and there’s no docking area on the private beach so they don’t have to worry about that, but there’s a chance he might try to escape by car. She switches on the infrared cameras of her helmet and scans the inside of the house, absentmindedly listening to the soft flapping of birds around her head.

“Concentration of five people in the upper right corner of the first floor. Guard and three dogs near the staircase. Four guards coming our way,” she informs him as he materializes next to her.

He doesn’t comment, only angles the barrels of his shotguns towards the white-painted frame of the French doors and fires a couple of times, splinters flying around as the bullets blast apart the wood. Reaper throws his weapons onto the tiles of the balcony, but they disperse into purplish smoke before they hit the floor.

“Where are those guards now? Hallway?”

Widowmaker tilts her head to the right before confirming his hunch. He doesn’t waste another moment, kicking the door open and stomping inside the main bedroom, towards the door.

“Wait outside, this won’t take long,” he orders gruffly as he pulls two new Hellfires from his flanks, somewhere concealed by his coat.

Shadows doom up around his feet in a circle when the first two guards storm the master bedroom, shrouding the four-poster bed, the traditional tapestry hanging from the ceiling against the left wall, the desk and the dresser. Reaper moves fluently, constantly circling around his own axis as he clears the corridor, a flurry of cloak and smoke and bright red gunfire. Dying men screaming their voices hoarse around him as they thud onto the ground.

When he’s done, he’s at the end of the hallway, with his bone-white mask facing her, standing out in the relative darkness. Widowmaker slyly smirks back at him as she stalks over towards him through the master bedroom, past the tapestry that’s tumbled down to the floor. The sound of her heels clacking on the parquet’s overshadowed by the incessant blearing of the sirens from the security system.

Down at the stairwell, they see how a pack of guards tries to lodge Danielewicz through the large patio doors in a square formation. She can hear Reaper growl next to her from behind his mask, and she can only imagine the creaking of the fabric of his gauntlets when he clenches his fists. They’re too close now to fuck this up.

Widowmaker narrows her eyes, switches back to automatic mode and positions the stock of her rifle close to her shoulder. Two guards are felled immediately, with each having about four to five bullets lodged into their torsos and throats, while one on the left gets hit in his arm. Danielewicz stands aghast, frightened, shaken like a child, surrounded by his remaining bodyguards.

He looks ashen, small, even with two dead men at his feet and –god- knows how many more in his closet, in the middle of the living room of his beach house, with its white walls, 70 inch flat screen, and designer interior. Reaper brandishes his shotguns and keeps them in front of him, arms outstretched as the bodyguards scamper around to whip their own pistols out.

One of them almost gets his entire head blown off. Reaper takes a step forwards, fires the shotgun in his left hand and takes out the guard on the outer right. She keeps the barrel of her rifle trained on Danielewicz’ head to make sure he doesn’t try anything funny, but while the thought of simply taking him out remains at the forefront of her mind, she finds she would rather see Reaper finish him off.

She would thrive more on his kill.

There are low growls somewhere behind her, coming from in between bared teeth and the upper lip of muzzles drawn upwards in vicious snarls. Whatever words the guard throws at her are lost in the steady rush of adrenalin. Widowmaker swings around and has to shift her weight around to balance on her right foot. Back to back with Reaper, her first instinct is to aim for the guard who has her clocked with the barrel of his .380 semi. He hesitates, probably the first time he faced a real threat, and she doesn’t squander the opportunity.

Gunshots echo throughout the living room. Widowmaker launches a venom mine at the floor in front of the two watch hounds and it activates with a drawn-out hiss when the dogs race past. Their leashes dragging on behind them. She shoots down one of them but just as she’s about to take on the other one, the dog launches itself at her.

Its heavy weight and the impact make her stagger backwards, drop her rifle in shock and collide onto the floor. She tries to push the animal off of her but its sharp teeth sink through the fabric of her bodysuit, going for her shoulder without the armored padding. Its jaw’s a deadlock. Shallow breaths escape her open mouth, and she slams one fist into its flank. This dog isn’t some mangy runt however, and seems largely unaffected by her assault.

Reaper crushes the animal’s neck in his armored fists and cuts off its windpipe long enough for it to open its bloodied maw. He then pulls and drags the squirming and panting dog off of her. Her shoulder’s aching, bitten open and bleeding profusely in between the tears in her bodysuit. With some effort, she settles upright and presses her hand flatly against the bite marks.

First, she locates her Widow’s Kiss, then she surveys the damage Reaper’s done to the living room. Danielewicz has three shot wounds on his torso; the crisp white button-up he was wearing now sports three uneven stains. He’s slumped on his side, head angled backwards, showing off the column of his throat. More bodies are strewn across the floor, some face-down, others on their backs. Someone shot the flat screen TV to pieces too.

“Can you stand up on your own?” Reaper asks her as he comes to stand next to her, his coat billowing along his calves.

She grits her teeth, refusing to moan out in pain. Haggard breathing fills the unusual quiet in her head, blocking off the sirens still going off outside. His claws glimmer in front of her, in the relative darkness, and she takes his extended hand with a grimace edged onto her features. Shit but does this hurt.

“Grab my gun, would you, and allons-y,” her voice sounds far off, even to herself, a bit weary too.

He gives her arm a tug and steadies her swaying body against his side, with his palm like a branding iron on her hip, muttering, “gonna have to check that out as soon as we can, com’on, enough time wasted here.”

.

Water cascades over her face; she angles her neck and closes her eyes, seated on her knees on the slippery tiles of the shower cubicle. It’s an old-fashioned bathroom, with bright blue decorations painted on the white tiles around the mirror by hand, and with soap shaped like a scallop shell on the edge of the lavabo. Hand towels are folded neatly over a gilded bar underneath it. Her shoulder burns underneath the soaked-through bandages, underneath the lukewarm water of the showerhead.

Once they’ve made it back to their room, Reaper had carefully peeled off her bodysuit, neglecting the shot wounds in his own gut, and sliced up one of the fitting sheets to make proper bandages. Her bodysuit was slumped around her waist while he wrapped up her shoulder as properly as he could manage. She’d pressed her fingertips to the torn leather of his armor, to the miscegenation of skin and fabric and bullet there.

“I can’t raise my arm,” Widowmaker confessed lowly when she’d coaxed a growl from him by a light exertion of pressure from her fingertip, continued in an even softer voice that made her sound too vulnerable for her own tastes, “you’ll have to help me shower and dress, mon chèr.”

If he was taken aback by her request, she wouldn’t be able to tell whatnot with his mask concealing his face and his body positioned behind her. There was no hitch in his movements either that might give away his thoughts.

Eventually Reaper just huffs and says, “fine, whatever. Let’s get you out of this fucking suit.”

He sits on the small rung outside of the glass of the shower cubicle, dressed in the pair of pants he was wearing this afternoon. His hands and forearms are soapy and wet from washing and rinsing her long tresses; his torso’s bare and the frayed flesh of his shot wounds, peeking out above the elastic waistband of his trousers, is already showing promising signs of regeneration. There’s a towel draped over his lap to help her dry her hair, and once she’s done, he intends to take a nice long shower himself.

His gaze travels over her body, from her high cheekbones to the exposed column of her throat, downwards to the slope of her breasts, her ribs, her abdomen and to the expanse of her legs; her pose reminiscent of the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen, forlorn, but not lost. After a while, the water had stopped being a diluted red.

Widowmaker tilts her head downwards and slowly opens her eyes; the folding door of the shower cubicle is shoved to one side so he had easier access to her hair, her hair that’s now stuck to her shoulders and back and front in wet tassels.

Some leftover foam eddies over the drain in the corner of the square as the water rushes in underneath.

She considers him as their gazes meet, acknowledges how a sudden spike of heat pools open in her stomach like an ink drop and how her heartbeat accommodates within her chest, a staccato rhythm that goes a 3/4^th time too fast. The corners of her lips twitch upwards in a ghost of a smile when she sees how his brows furrow together.

“What?” Reaper prompts, a sense of uneasiness noticeable in the tone of his voice and the way he straightens his spine.

Her palms come to rest on the edge of the small rung as she moves forwards, a wince escaping her because her shoulder protests the seemingly easy adjustment of position, crawling closer to him. She’s halfway out of the shower cubicle now, her blue skin uncaring for the change in temperature, her endlessly long hair framing the shape of her face, her cheeks, falling down to the tiles in curls.  

He makes a show of rolling his eyes when she hisses out in pain, but seems genuinely curious to what she’s doing. It’s easy to see that he’s on heightened alert, but not alarmed by her actions.

“What are you doing? You’re not spacing out on me again, are you?”

Suspicion is evident in his expression when Widowmaker brings one hand to his knee to steady herself, leaning in closer to him. Drops of water fall onto the legs of his trousers, onto the ridiculously fluffy towel in his lap.

Humor laces her tone of voice as she answers coyly, “Mon chèr, je veux te remercier.”

And then, she presses her mouth to his in a close-lipped kiss, the tip of her nose brushing against his, the bristle of his beard tickling her chin. Her fingers curl around the edge of the rung, her other hand slides up his thigh, more assertive than the push of her lips against his. Reaper brings two coarse fingertips to her jaw, holds her head still as he appraises her from up-close, and way too personal. One brow twitches upwards into an arch when she bares her teeth at him in a playful smile, unafraid.

“I’m not Gérard,” there’s a hint of aggravation as he pronounces the name.

Widowmaker shakes her head slightly, responding firmly, “and I’m not Amélie Lacroix anymore, won’t ever become her again.”

His thumb flicks over the gaunt of her cheek, then comes to rest on the hinge of her jaw. Reaper scrutinizes her face, sweeps his gaze from her wet lips to the slope of her nose to her own gaze. She wonders if it irks him that there’s no ulterior motive behind what she’s done, wonders if it’s the brutal honesty of her mouth that causes him to grimace and scoff.

“Good.”—and this one word shouldn’t be spoken in a way that can actually make her shiver, make her fingers clench onto the fabric of his pants.

Reaper claims her open mouth mid-exhale, presses one palm to the side of her ribcage and holds onto her head with his other hand, sweeps the tip of his tongue over her bottom lip and regards her intensively with heavy lidded eyes. She can taste thick smoke and skin too that’s flaked loose. Water still comes down onto her legs, onto her feet, but it’s impossible to tell whether it’s still lukewarm or gone cold when he kisses her as demandingly as he’s doing right now.

When they’re done and he’s dried her hair and offered her this horrible yellow bathrobe to lounge around in, he escorts her over to the queen-sized bed. Strips of sheet are strewn around the bed on the floor. Her helmet’s placed on the only chair in the bedroom and her bodysuit’s discarded on the foot-end, together with her boots. She spots his mask on the small night table, next to the reading lamp, a set of tweezers and remnants of two bullets, and assumes he simply stashed his coat and armor into the rickety wardrobe.

“Go rest up,” he orders gruffly, “I’ll join you soon.”

It’s still dark outside, but some light from the street lantern comes streaming inside through the window. Widowmaker lies down on her back, not bothering to grab the blankets and lie down underneath them. Her bandages are soggy against her skin and make a squelching sound when she shifts position.

“I thought you didn’t need to sleep, mon chèr. Did I wear you out?” She teases drowsily, barely able to suppress a yawn. Her body needs to recuperate, more so since it’s already in a fragile state from the biomedical reconditioning.

In front of her eyes, the ceiling seems to blur into shades of bronzed brown, and she can barely discern his response, but it was something close to might make an exception for a woman like you. He doesn’t comment any further, even though her switchblade smile should’ve warranted some sort of snippy remark.

.

They’ve been on the run for five months now, counting on Gabriel Reyes’ former associates or cheap motel rooms to avoid detection by the various organizations after them, and tracking down past UN representatives who had anything to do with Overwatch’ decision making process and past Overwatch operatives themselves. Most of their funding comes from frozen Blackwatch accounts that Reaper refers to as dead money, jackpots no one effectively claimed but executives kept siphoning money into for future use.

Eventually their hunt leads them to where they are now: an apartment on the thirty-first floor of a skyscraper in the heart of Taipei. From where they’re standing in the entry hall, they can look straight ahead through the large rectangular window that takes up the entirety of the wall in the living room, giving them a beautiful view of the capital. In the darkness of night, the wallpaper’s reduced to a dull rosé, accentuated by the lights coming from inside the cabinets that display all sorts of sculptures. It’s a cluttered apartment, with bouquets of orchids, hibiscus, and geraniums on every ancillary table, dousing the interior in various and strong fragrances.

Widowmaker watches how Reaper casually steps over the body of the UN representative he just assassinated and stalks over to the back of the living room. His coat swishes along his calves with every movement and the silver spine edged in the fabric glimmers faintly in the dimmed lighting. Blood soaks into the cream-colored carpet. She regards the pale visage of the woman for a fleeting moment, regards the unhinged jaw, the ‘o’-shaped mouth, and her dry eyes, like a dusty mirror, then continues inwards as well.

Her usual bodysuit’s been replaced by a new design after a run-in with one of Talon’s strike teams; this one sports a corset in an obnoxious pink color Luis picked up in some goth shop downtown Madrid, but it allows more cartridges for her venom mines and covers up her chest. So it serves its purpose adequately, she supposes. Her helmet’s received an update as well, thanks to an IT specialist Reaper had worked with in Rio once during his career.

There’s a stereo installation in between the two cabinets and out of curiosity, she drags one fingertip over the smooth metallic surface before pressing the play button. Something mellow comes on, a soft piano and a smoky woman’s voice crooning in Japanese. Her thin heels stab into the carpet as she stalks over to Reaper near the window.

“So,” she begins conversationally, looking over the play of lights of the city, “where to for the next kill?”

He crosses his arms over his chest before he responds, “Sombra tracked a former Overwatch demolition expert down to Venice.”

“Venice,” she echoes the name before continuing, “très romantique, tu ne penses pas? ”

Her question comes accompanied by the tilt of her head, an amused smirk adorning her lips, and her bumping her hip to his. Multi-colored lights, reds and greens and blues and whites, reflect almost ominously on the blank expanse of his mask. Reaper angles his neck to look at her, before shifting his weight on his other leg, uncrossing his arms again and grabbing her wrist. His claws tease the inside of her wrist.

“Not the part where we’re going,” he rebukes in a rough voice, turning around entirely to face her properly, propping one shoulder against the window glass.

Widowmaker leans into him, familiar with the outline of his body pressed against hers, despite the red cartridges strapped along his chest. Her mouth leaves a purple mark on the cheekbone chiseled into the mask.

“Quel domage,” she drawls lazily as his hand trails up her arm, her neck and comes to rest on the side of her face.

His clawed thumb carefully trails over the outline of her bottom lip, smudges up the plum lipstick there, but doesn’t nick the sensitive skin. There’s no need to rush, they’ve used a .22 pistol with a silencer that they got on the black market to finish their target off. So the rest of the apartment building wouldn’t get a crude awakening from a gunshot.

And while Widowmaker doesn’t need the luxury of a bed to rest up per se, she does like to have her way with him slowly, drawn-out, does like to see his naked, fucked-up body sprawled on top the blank canvas of a king-sized mattress as she looms over him, hungry. Reaper might not necessarily share her opinion, but he indulges her sometimes, after a successful mission or when there’s no way someone would stumble across their hideout.

They might not be fond of affection, but their bodies have been starving for far too long.

On the backdrop, the crescendo of the woman’s voice echoes throughout the entire living room, overshadowing the accompaniment of the piano. His other hand comes to rest on the handle of her hip and it makes her smirk widen. She tilts her head backwards so he can rest his forehead against the column of her throat, the bolts in his mask cool but not cooler than her skin, with his shoulders slumped forwards and now with both hands on her waist, sliding down the curve of her behind.

Reaper lifts her up and her legs fold around his hips immediately, slip underneath the inside of his coat. Her arms come to rest on the straight line of his shoulders, wrists crossed behind his hood. She forgets about the scenery outside when she looks into the black gauze in the eye sockets of his mask. There’s no one else he could stand in her position, gazing down at him, entangled with him so intimately they’re almost one being, and there’s no one else she could stand in her position either.

This is the closest someone can get to staring death in the face and the privilege is hers and hers alone.

.