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T-PLUS TWELVE HOURS….
Lena gently set the VTOL down within the hangar, just as quiet and graceful as you please. The footsteps of the Queen herself were louder and heavier, she’d wager.
She powered the vessel down and sat in her pilot’s chair for a few moments. With any luck, no one had even heard her arrive. She’d just slip on down to Winston’s lab and tell him what she’d learned, then she’d be free and clear. Winston wasn’t really what you’d call “judgmental”. He knew what she’d been doing, and he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he didn’t get all temperamental about it. And she’d gotten the information, hadn’t she? Not that it did them much good, but relying on assumptions would’ve been much worse!
Confident that her night had gone perfectly so far, Lena stood up, popped the hatch, and quietly exited the craft, knowing that if there was a just and loving God, He’d keep it going perfectly until dawn.
She took two steps across the hangar floor and froze.
Winston was waiting for her, which wasn’t good.
Ana Amari was standing in front of him, which was worse.
And good old Soldier 76 was in front of her, which was even worse. Worst of all, he glowered at her, looking all extra-Morrison-y. (Really, who did he think he was fooling?!)
“Shite,” Lena muttered.
“Tracer,” Soldier 76 said. “Why don’t you, Ana and I step inside your VTOL? I want to have a private conversation with you, ASAP.”
“I really don’t think – “ Winston began.
“Save it,” Soldier – Morrison – barked. “I need you to wait outside the VTOL and make sure nobody intrudes.”
At three in the morning? Who’d be in the hangar at three in the morning?
Besides, you know, them.
Lena found her thought process derailed as Morrison practically ushered her into the VTOL, then slammed the hatch shut as Ana followed them in.
“Where is she?” Morrison demanded without any other preamble.
“Well, hello to you too, Seventy-Six,” Lena replied cheekily. “I’m fine, thanks. Lovely night we’re – “
“Tracer, please,” Ana said. “This is a very serious situation. Did you get the information or not?”
Lena deflated. Right, yeah, the situation. “I did,” she said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
“Where does Talon have her?” Morrison asked.
Lena shrugged. “Beats me. They don’t know where Satya is either.”
Neither of the old Overwatch veterans spoke right away. “What,” Morrison said, “is that supposed to mean?”
“What do you THINK it means?” Lena burst out. “It means I don’t know where they’re holding Satya, because they’re not the ones who fucking took her!”
Morrison was starting to look visibly angry, and Ana placed a hand on his elbow. “Please, let me handle this,” she said gently.
He grunted and moved aside. “You’ve known her longer anyway,” he grumbled.
Lena rolled her eyes. Way to maintain the secret, Jack.
Ana stepped closer to Lena, and reflexively she swallowed. This was Fareeha’s MOM, not to mention the woman who’d lost an eye to Widowmaker’s bullet. She had wanted to avoid this discussion because Ana would extract every detail, and Lena did NOT want to share them with her. It’d be awkward on a bloody massive scale.
“Lena,” Ana said. “How can you be sure Talon does not have Symmetra? How do you know the information is reliable? Who is your source?”
Lena grimaced and looked away. “Someone high up in their organization,” she said vaguely.
Ana said nothing. She just waited.
“Look,” Lena said helplessly. “Don’t get mad, okay? It’s Widowmaker.”
Morrison put a hand over his face and grumbled something unintelligibly, while Ana just closed her eye and sighed.
“Yes, all right, I know she’s done terrible things,” Lena continued hurriedly. “But she’s one of their top field operatives! She knows things!”
“And she’s just volunteering this information because?” Morrison asked from behind Ana. “What does she get out of it? You can’t promise her anything, Tracer, you don’t have the authority to do that.”
“I haven’t promised her anything,” Lena said. “We just have this – arrangement.”
“An arrangement,” Ana repeated slowly. “You can’t possibly be suggesting that you and Widowmaker . . .”
“That we what?”
“That you’re fucking each other,” Morrison growled.
“I said let me handle this,” Ana snapped.
Lena just stared at him. “What?! No. No! Are you kidding? No sex! No sex involved!”
“Then what is it?” Ana asked.
“I just . . .” Lena hesitated.
“Whatever it is, it’s not important, Lena,” Ana said. “What’s important is that you make us understand why you can trust the information she’s provided you.”
“Okay,” Lena replied quietly. She drew a deep breath. “I just . . . WE just sort of try to kill each other for a couple hours.”
Ana looked at her strangely. Then she cast a glance over her shoulder at Soldier 76, who now looked utterly mystified. “I think,” she said, “you will have to be more specific than that.”
Lena swiveled the pilot’s chair around and plopped down into it. “See, you’ve gotta understand, it’s because of her reconditioning. She doesn’t just shoot people because she enjoys it. She does it because she needs to. It’s a compulsion for her. They programmed her so that the longer she goes without killing somebody, the worse it gets. Widowmaker says it’s like having an itch in that one part of the body you just can’t seem to reach.”
“So why would her trying to kill you help?” Ana asked. “Obviously she’s NOT killing you, so I fail to see how this would ease her compulsion.”
“Well, it all started back with Mondatta,” Lena said miserably. “After she killed him. We had this moment on the roof of a building, right before she escaped, where she seemed . . . happy for some reason. Kind of an evil happy, yeah? Real malicious and all? So I didn’t think much of it at first, until I realized that I’ve never seen her look ANY kind of happy before. She’s always been ‘ooh, oui oui, I am so aloof, I do not feel emotions, no?’.”
“I think we get the point, yes, Lena,” Ana said.
“Right, got it. So, there was that. Plus she didn’t try to kill me when she could have. Not at the end, when she had the chance. Widowmaker just gave me that little smirk and took off. And later, looking back, I thought that was really WEIRD, you know? So, next time we were on opposite sides of a mission, I got close enough where I could ask her about it. By which, of course, I mean I shouted my question from twenty yards away, but I asked her all the same.”
“And what did she say?”
“She sounded all cross, like she didn’t want to talk about it! At first she even pretended she didn’t know what I meant!” Lena rubbed the back of her head. “Took a while to get the truth out of her. Which was the problem, actually.”
Morrison loomed closer again. “WHAT problem?”
Lena pulled back a little. “Well, there was a lot of shooting back and forth, she’d fall back, I’d follow, she’d ambush me, I’d blink away, rinse and repeat, yeah? And at one point, she nicked me a little bit. A bullet may have, you know, um, pierced my collarbone?”
“What the hell?! When did this happen?! It wasn’t in any of Mercy’s reports!” Morrison snapped.
“Because I rewound time, obviously!” Lena retorted. “Didn’t make that same mistake twice, let me tell you. But for HER, it was still like she hit me. And the shooting stopped, and suddenly she felt like talking about it.”
Ana did not look any more enlightened than when Lena had started. “And what did she say?”
“Basically? She was in a good mood.”
“For Christ’s – “ Morrison began.
“No, I mean it! Suddenly she was all snooty, and rubbing it in my face that she had hit me, even though I made it so that it didn’t happen, she still had the memory of it, you know? And after that got old for her, Widowmaker said that her programmers must’ve left something out when they explained about her conditioning and her compulsion and everything.”
“Which is?” Ana asked, leaning in.
“Well, if the mission is really challenging, and really long, and she’s in the thick of it the whole time? And she finally hits her objective? Or even just comes really close to it? She gets this sort of – euphoria. Almost like a reward well-done?”
Ana groaned a little bit.
“What?” Lena asked.
“Lena, child, I know that you said you’re not having sex,” she said calmly. “But what you described, it sounds like Widowmaker has an orgasm after a really good kill.”
Lena’s her eyes grew wide. “Oh. Oh! All right, yeah, I see your point. But I thought it was just like some kind of endorphin rush, like all snipers got that way!”
“You take pride in the achievement,” Ana replied. “But you don’t get the sort of – contact high you’re describing. That would seem to be unique to Widowmaker.” She stopped. “And fairly new even for her.”
“Whatcha mean?”
“The way you described it, it sounds like Widowmaker was saying that the Mondatta assassination was the first time she ever attained the state of euphoria you’ve described. How many missions has she been on?” Ana asked.
“Eighty-seven,” Soldier 76 said immediately.
Ana blinked. Lena didn’t think she was expecting an answer. “Er, thank you, Soldier. Eighty-seven missions, and she never got that rush until you challenged her one-on-one.”
“Well,” Lena said, not even shooting for false modesty, “I am pretty bloody awesome out there.”
“Yes,” Ana agreed. “And that’s why you have an – arrangement with Widowmaker, isn’t it? She can’t get the same rush against anyone else.”
Lena nodded. “Pretty much, yeah. There’s always the missions, but I guess they don’t usually last long enough for her to achieve, um . . .” She didn’t think “climax” was the word she wanted to use here. “Satisfaction,” she instead said, which wasn’t much better. “Plus sometimes I’m on a mission and she’s not there, or she’s on one and I’m not there? Apparently that really gets her knickers in a twist.” Which was, she realized, her second unintentional innuendo in ten seconds.
“I don’t like it,” Soldier 76 muttered. “You losing on purpose so she can get some sort of fix? What if next time, she gets bored and decides she’d rather just kill you for real?”
“Excuse me?!” Lena retorted, deeply insulted. “You think I’m losing on PURPOSE? I’ve never taken a fucking dive in my life! If you know how many missions Widowmaker has been on, right off the top of your head, then you can bloody well listen when I speak! I said WE try to kill EACH OTHER for a couple hours.”
“You do?” he asked.
“That’s where part of the adrenaline comes from, she says,” Lena explained. “Having to keep on her toes, having to leave a great sniper’s nest and find a new vantage point because I get too close, having to dodge incoming fire? It’s not like she’s just shooting a really fast fish in a really big barrel, or something.”
“What happens if you win?” Ana asked. “Then she wouldn’t get that contact high you’ve described.”
“I’m not trying THAT hard to kill her,” Lena admitted. “If I had her dead to rights, that’d be it for the night, yeah. Which is why I don’t let it get that far. And eventually . . . “
“Eventually WHAT?”
Lena tapped her earlobe. “We’re on the same frequency the whole time. Eventually she starts making these . . . noises, and I know she’s really close.”
“Don’t you dare ask her ‘what kind of noises’,” Ana immediately told Soldier. “I think we can guess.”
Lena thought she was half-right. She might have the basic idea of the kind of things Widowmaker said, but she couldn’t guess what it felt like, hearing a woman mutter stuff like ‘merde, so close, so FUCKING close’ right in your ear in a sexy French accent. Not that Lena cared to enlighten her.
Besides, the next part was awkward enough. “So, I come out of whatever cover I’ve found, I make myself enough of a target where it’s a breeze for her to hit me, and – I wait to hear the sound of her pulling the trigger.”
“Oh, Lena,” Ana said disapprovingly. “This is too dangerous. Even if you can rewind back to before the shot. What if your timing is off? What if you’re hit before you can rewind? What if it’s a headshot?”
“I trust her,” Lena insisted. “Enough to not want to kill me, anyway. Enough to not slay the golden goose.”
“How about her information?” Soldier 76 asked. “Do you trust THAT?”
Lena nodded. “The way she said it, it didn’t sound rehearsed or false. She heard it through Reaper. Said that Talon was shitting a brick because they swore to the client that Satya was going to be there today. Which, she was, of course, but Talon don’t know that because she disappeared before shots were fired, yeah? And they got paid a truckload of money to bring Satya in, dead or alive. Reaper thought this was hilarious.”
And a little irritating, apparently. Widowmaker had said that he threatened “havoc and war” three times if Talon told him to “ride in the back of any more trucks”. She hadn’t known what that meant, so Lena didn’t bother repeating it.
“Reaper found it funny that Talon didn’t get what they wanted?” Soldier 76 asked.
“I don’t get the impression that him OR Widowmaker think very highly of Talon,” Lena said. “They just hate Overwatch more.”
“I’m more interested in the fact that Talon was HIRED by someone to abduct Symmetra,” Ana pointed out. “Did Widowmaker know who the client was?”
“You bet she did,” Lena said grimly. “Satya’s old employers, the Vishkar Corporation.”
“Makes sense,” Soldier 76 agreed. “She burned a lot of bridges with them, leaving like she did and taking all her gadgets with her.”
Ana frowned. “Perhaps. Emotionally, it makes sense. But they’re a corporation. Financially it makes no sense at all. What does it profit them, spending millions for one woman who they don’t even care if she survives or not?”
“Maybe it’s about the tech then,” Lena said. “I’ve never seen anyone else make teleportation portals like she can.”
“Yes, but why do they need it? They invented the technology. Why don’t they just build more?”
“Beats me.”
“And now we have no leads on Satya’s whereabouts,” Soldier 76 reminded them. “What now?”
“Maybe we should pay Vishkar a visit,” Ana suggested. “They may not have her, but if we knew why they WANT her, that might give us a clue.”
“It’s an idea,” Soldier 76 said. “We’ll have to discuss it with some of the others first.”
“Brill!” Lena told them. “So, I’m a little wiped out, seeing as how I just spent the past few hours piloting a VTOL, then trying not to be killed by a world-class sniper. Maybe I could . . . ?”
Soldier glared at her. “Next time you even think about trying not to be killed by a world-class sniper? You clear it with us. Or you’ll have THIS world-class sniper to worry about,” he added, pointing at Ana.
Ana smiled modestly. “Just be careful, Lena.”
“Oh, careful, that’s me, all right, don’t you worry about me.”
She didn’t look that reassured as she and Soldier 76 exited the VTOL, leaving Lena briefly alone. All in all, it could have gone better, but it could have gone worse too.
Like, for example, if Winston had waited outside the VTOL after Soldier 76 and Ana left, to ask a couple questions of his own? That could be considered “worse”. Lena was quite certain of that, because that was EXACTLY what happened next.
“Quite a story,” he said to her, as her nerves spiked again. Wasn’t long ago, she was hoping to spill the beans to Winston. Now, after being put through the wringer by Ana and Morrison, her anxiety levels were MUCH higher.
“True,” she agreed.
“What did they say,” he went on, “when you told them about how if you get to Widowmaker before she gets to you, the two of you start . . . what was the word you used last week? ‘Snogging’?”
She turned bright red all over again. “Something like that, probably.”
He nodded. “Start ‘snogging’ for ten minutes, then start chasing each other all over again. What did they say?”
“I maaaaaaay have left that part out,” Lena said. Which he knew full well, seeing as how he’d been right outside.
“Ah,” he said.
Lena had said sex wasn’t involved. She never said there wasn’t a little foreplay though.
“I hope Satya is all right,” Winston added heavily.
“I’m hoping, if Talon doesn’t have her, and Vishkar doesn’t have her,” Lena said, “how bad could it be?”
Having evaluated the situation and her options, Symmetra thought things were pretty bad right now.
She didn’t remember how she got here. She just remembered waking up and finding not only that her weapons were gone, but that her cybernetic arm was barely functional. She could move her fingers slightly, but even that was inconsistent at best. Even her clothing had disappeared. Her captors had left her wearing some kind of ill-fitting orange prison jumpsuit.
Symmetra couldn’t even find the door in the small room she was trapped inside. All the walls, and even the floor, were just a series of smooth gray panels that fit perfectly together. Admittedly the room appealed to her aesthetics, but she didn’t take any comfort in that, to be honest.
She was unarmed, defenseless, imprisoned, and lacked even the basic knowledge of where she was and how she’d gotten there. So, all in all, pretty fucking bad.
“Hello?” Symmetra finally called out. “Where am I? Who are you? What have you done with me?!”
For the next few seconds, there was no answer.
“You know, I’ve been debating how to begin.”
The voice had seemingly come from all around her. More importantly, it had chilled Symmetra, because the voice was definitely that of a female omnic. She had been very worried about what her captors could do with her technology at their disposal, when she thought she was being held by humans. But if she was being held by omnics, then she was truly alarmed.
“I considered starting by remarking on your weight. Because you should be applauded. I know that society pressures women to be thin, but you’ve really, truly risen to the challenge by being as – skeletal as you are. Probably by subsisting all your life on a diet of just saltines and tea.”
Symmetra was at an absolute loss as to how to respond, seeing as how the conversation had rapidly taken a turn for the utter bizarre. What kind of omnic spoke like that?
“But I decided that a more - direct approach was called for,” the female omnic said, and then stopped.
Without warning, ALL of the wall panels directly across from Symmetra began flipping over, at first revealing pitch black space behind them. Then there was a dim yellow light that rapidly grew brighter as . . . that was no omnic.
That, in fact, was the curved, rectangular metal box approaching her, almost as big as Symmetra was, with a matte black lens occupying much of the front. In the direct center was a large yellow dot, almost like an eye. Behind it, Symmetra could see some kind of giant robotic arm, almost like what one might see in an automated factory.
The yellow dot narrowed, and even though it was little more than an oversized monitor, Symmetra could almost sense a feeling of palpable hostility emanating from it.
“Where is she?”
Oh yes, she could DEFINITELY sense the hostility.
“What,” the robotic – thing said, its voice dripping with barely-controlled fury, “have you done with Chell?”
The End.