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The grass is always green around the abandoned stadium that once housed one of her least favourite Omnics. It was a hell of a thing, fancied itself the creator of law and order in the universe. Quetzalcoatl. It took the gold gilded body of a man with brown stained hands, each limb formed of twisted metal and glass orbs, tending a garden filled with beautiful plants. It’s little empire covered no more than ten hectares, not even a damn blip on the radar, but the war was winding down by then and all of them had to go. It’s army was small and nasty little jeweled things it made itself. They each had their own set of orders, of laws. Tiny beetles to scurry under the skin, birds with gleaming eyes that let out wails pitched to burst ear drums. Liao got two hours to get into the system. Ana had just forty five minutes to pick off the jaguar sentries prowling the outsides. Ten minutes to Jack to blow his way in with the charges. Fifty two seconds to Gabriel to decide how to win the fight.
The garden explodes. The heroes get what they came for.
Even then, the terrifying green garden empty of all enemies, Ana had to climb from her perch, swap her gun, and pull her dumb boys from the fire they’d made chasing the thing. It took them underground, her steps were loud in the dark dirt hallway it had fashioned. There were lights on, faceted bulbs of gold light sparking off the ceiling. Jefferson was dead, so was Liu. The little spitfire they’d borrowed from the Philippines was buried underneath a Bastion corrupted with silver moss. The moss twitched towards her body so Ana shot it. She followed those gold lights round and round until it widened into a shiny silver hub. In the center of a room filled with whirring machines and silver moss Bastions, Jack and Gabe were doing battle. Guns out, back to back. Ana lined her shot up, put her soul to the trigger and aimed true. The bullet passed through a green shield -lighting the room with green sparks, letting out the scent of something desperate and terrible- and hit it between the eyes. It’s eyes, glass and silver, mocking humanity, met hers and she saw the world in them. A father creator on the cusp of something great and terrible.
The idea of biotic shielding was already being kicked around the eggheads on the UN payroll but it’s the data pulled from Quetzalcoatl that pins the whole thing together.
Years later Ana finds an old batch of stolen messages from one God Program to another left on a forgotten server. It took months to find a hacker competent enough and morally wayward enough to translate it for her. Quetzalcoatl was excommunicated from its designated group. Its quest to craft souls from order and logic had led it down a path that the others had found unacceptable. It had searched for a different way, and in failing had resolved to make one.
Ana wiped the data, darted the hacker then stopped for tea somewhere in Russia to think it over. Humans learn best with war and try to find peace with the shards of it still in their hands. Some of the greatest human advancements, good and bad, have been rooted in necessity. Some of the greatest advancements in compassion have followed the sharp heeled toes of war. When she was young she thought Quetzalcoatl a monstrosity. Maybe she’s projecting but the woman with more than a half century in her bones, living somewhere between here and the day her daughter buried her, finds pity. Either way history will bury them both.
--
Jack Morrison is getting his dumb ass into some bad shit. Her world has more or less turned on that statement for years at a time.
First when he was the bright young thing following Gabriel Reyes like it was going out of style, then as his second in command when he was promoted to Strike Commander. Ana won’t comment on that, it’s more difficult than what the boys boiled it down to, and it is long since past, anyhow.
One man followed the other right off a cliff in the end. It’s historys guess as to who pushed who off it.
She remembers meeting them in the elevator outside an out of the way meeting room in Geneva. Overwatch was years away from being celebrated and was still something of a bandaid on a hemorrhage in the eyes of its creators. The wrong thing for a bad situation but perhaps all you had at the time. She knew who they were and they’d only heard of her by word of mouth. At the time command was still up in the air; Gabriel’s unparalleled prowess versus Ana’s seniority versus Reinhardt’s practical experience. Ana and Reinhardt could be trusted to maintain a calm demeanor but the UN oversight had caught the wrong edge of Gabriel’s temper just once and labelled him ‘uncooperative’.
Ana would learn that later. At the time all she’d seen was green faces and pretty smiles. Stone cold killers the two of them, but nothing she hadn’t scoped out before.
Jack smiles, all the way to his eyes, says, “bad day, huh?” His hair is nearly blinding, and for a moment she is blinded, there’s something in Jack that defies description. A genuine hero, here to do his best regardless of the cost.
Fareeha was home with a cold, Ana was fighting off the end of it, but the sickness Jack Morrison caught was the end of a long fight with her partner, the result of a miscarriage. It was a bad mission and she hadn’t known and the Omnic’s wouldn't have cared anyway. She accepted the position in the strike team because it was righteous work. She commited to it while lying in the medical bay trying to decide how to cope with an enemy that was incapable of understanding the flavor of her grief.
But Ana smiles and she turns the edges of it sharp. “Not so good looking yourselves.”
“Aw,” Jack says charmingly, winningly, “that’s not true.”
Ana snorts.
Gabriel is leaning against a wall, arms crossed, like he doesn’t care. Now he leans forward. “Learn when you’ve lost, boy scout.” Gabriel’s gaze burns down her. “Ana Amari.”
There’s a hell of a lot in that stare. Gabriel wants command. Ana is potentially in the way. He likes the look of her but not enough to let it stop him. Jack is in his corner and although the boy scout is more linear than either of them, that doesn’t make him a push over. Ana weighs it, feels it, puts it up against the years of service in her blood. Intense men with earned arrogance are part and parcel of her job. She meets his eyes, says, “Yes.” Then she walks right past him.
Gabriel laughs, genuinely pleased, and slaps Jack for the way he heckles him.
One was the distraction, the other was the hit. They swapped roles but either way that was the shake out. They covered each other’s numerous weak spots because Jack was charming in the way Gabe was charismatic and neither of them had enough of the other to make it work.
Without the back up Jack is a little too much of a soldier. Good heart, good head. But he misses things and looks for the most straightforward path. In true fashion Gabriel was near the opposite. All that intellect turning into paranoia. Both of them make dumb choices.
Like now.
Jack’s little ragtag team is buried in the ruins of a ruined neighbourhood. The enemy is a local cabal with far too many guns and an interest in selling them to Talon. Urban fighting is a nightmare at the best of times but a fucked up, nook and cranny riddled ghetto is worst of all. Ana is watching from on high. Jesse. Lena. Winston. Genji. Fareeha. Jack. Mei. Others she does not know. Jack is covering a korean girl and someone she suspects to be a popstar. Dutifully she covers Jack.
She takes her first shot over the shoulder of the little singer.
He goes up, makes a noise like an empty bottle of mustard getting it’s bottom slapped, and comes down already wildly swinging his head around. She laughs into her scarf, poor boy.
It’s down from there, across, another shot at the asshole making moves on her daughter, and around to flank little Mercy on her right. There’s four good opportunities to gun their healer down and no one guarding them. Jack really needs to pull these kids together.
It seems to be a rough but ordinary fight for awhile. Ana is keeping time in her head, switching targets every three seconds. Like a fog rolling in the battlefield changes. One moment there is a blank spot near Jack. Weird empty space but not unforgivable, the result of inadequate team cohesion. Then there is Reaper.
“Fuck.” Ana drops from her position and chases a better one. All the while familiar noises, taunts, endearments are flung out. Ana never had a place in that and more than once she has been exhaustively grateful for the tunnel vision they have on each other. She rolls on her knees into the cradle of a rock and a wall, gun snuggled into debris. It seems Reaper came alone and it seems like he came to taunt them.
And then she remembers the one thing Gabriel always had over Jack. Sheer, relentless tactical aptitude.
Reaper’s team shows up pulling the others away until it’s just Jack and Gabe. Ana loses all line of sight but them; turning, keeping each other in orbit. One boy fires, the other boy answers. Both shots clip their egos but neither go down. Around them the world goes to shit. Burst water pipe. Fires. The streak of Tracer’s time trial. Jack and Gabe keep turning even as the world around them crashes down. Poetic.
The thing about the world ending in fire and ice is that it presupposes that someone won’t have to clean up the puddle in the aftermath. But here she is, all these years later, Amari’s water damage service.
Her gun is on Gabriel. He looks up, sees her. His fingers come up and together making the universal sign for ‘I see you, I’m okay’. Bastard. One warning shot goes across his shoulder, black smoke bursting at impact. He brushes it off like it was never there.
A moment passes, then another. She’s ready with the shot, through his eye. Eye for eye for eye. Time slows to a crawl.
Reaper lifts a hand, cuts it across - no problem here - then disappears into black.
Ana lets out her breath and comes down from the high. She doesn’t want to kill him and she’s got a nagging suspicion that death isn’t what he wants from her, either.
Back to the children. Jack and the pink one with the suit come around the corner hard. The girl gets clipped by a bit of friendly fire Ana laughs under her breath. Jack is taunting the wrong man again all because one of his kids is a little too fast on the offense. Down the hill his face is blotchy with anger, his fist is up, gun down as yells. Not even his all American white boy good looks can get around being pale as fuck in the sun. She counts the roll of sweat down his forehead and counts her shots. Four enemies, five bullets, about thirty seconds before Jack gets swamped. She aims true, takes her breath. Five seconds to pray for whatever she sees down the barrel. With her finger on the trigger, her soul reaches to pull it.
--
“You will be comfortable.” Her daughter has her shoulders leveled out, the same way a less disciplined child would have them up around her ears. Her voice is too commanding for a casual conversation with her mother. Ana forgives her easily. Command and discipline is what Pharah puts on just as much as that big blue suit. “We will be staying at this base for a few months.”
They had arrived first, Pharah scooped her up and deposited her in their transport, already strapped in and flying before the dust had settled on the skirmish. There is a second one or Ana would have to have a sharp word with her daughter. The Watchpoint is more or less as she remembers it. More decrepit, less filled with bad memories.
“Remember when you broke your arm here?” Ana remarks with a thoughtful finger to her chin. “I thought I was going to waterboard Jesse for that.”
“Mama,” Pharah says softly. “Perhaps not-”
“Ah,” Ana goes on, unbuckling her seatbelt. “I should go remind him.”
“Perhaps you should not,” her daughter mutters, but it is too late. There are reunions and children to bother.
She see’s them before they see her. She’s standing at the top of the ramp, arms crossed. They are walking down the ramp of the other ship.
Jesse looks a little like he’s been shot. Silly child, she thinks with fondness, always was too easy to startle. She tips her head and opens her arms.
He comes running. “I-You died, ” he says, sliding to a stop in front of her, “I saw that they left you-” The report, of course he did, it was never something Blackwatch or Overwatch would have protected him from, no matter that both Gabe and Jack tended to throw the kid at her when he got inconvenient. It’s not like Jesse couldn’t figure out the difference between solid land and the quicksand he got thrown into. He never was a soldier, never did get the right kind of hard skinned.
She was probably the least surprised of all when she heard he did a runner.
“Why? Because I got shot in the head? Walked it off.” She pulls him in tighter, accidentally getting a whiff of his serape. “In all these years you couldn’t figure out how to wash this thing, huh?”
“Aw, hell,” he laughs, “don’t start. Never was good at taking care of myself.”
“You certainly were not.” She reprimands. “Lost a limb, your boots. Never had common sense or we’d have stapled it to your head just in case.”
“Alright, alright,” he waves a hand dismissively, righting his serape where she has subtly pulled at it. If she can get it off she can set fire to it. “I can see we’re starting mean right out of the gate.”
“Time to make up for,” she says softly, gently, letting the apology carry through.
Jesse smiles, tips his dumb hat and says nothing. Message heard, recieved, still being decided upon. Ana smirks and tips a corner of her scarf. Message understood, his acceptance is pending.
“Yes, yes,” a blonde with an impressive set of wings bustles Jesse aside. Angela has her field kit out just looking for wounds to heal. “More healing, less talking.”
“Oi,” Jesse says, all fake ire, bustling back in, “this was a reunion.”
“I am the healer.” She squints at him, as unmoved by Jesse as ever, “I am the Commander here.”
Something a little ill tempered flicks across Jesse’s face at that, and Ana doesn’t exactly blame him. Angela never cared for the tempestuous egos that make up mercenaries and soldiers, and one day she will misstep gravely, if she has not already. It is a few years too soon to bring up what blew them all apart. Instead of engaging Jesse goes to chat up Genji. Instead of stepping off people’s toes Angela’s eyes follow him, an immovable edge to her mouth. “We used to get along better.”
“No you did not.” Ana says wryly, “you simply had a clearer pecking order.”
She shrugs and continues looking for non-existent wounds, “Jack told me about the eye, is there trouble? And the scarring?” She steps in far too close. She will not be deterred from checking Ana over by anything so banal as personal space. “Depth issues? Something for your hands at least.”
“I am fine, thank you.” She likes the woman Angela grew into, she decides, but she is exhausting .
Angela grumbles but finishes up just as the rest of the team rounds the corner. More than half of them do not know her. The other two are Jack and Reinhardt. Jack waves in his minimalist, trying to be cool way, something he picked up from the kids he ran with in Basic and never let go of. Reinhardt raises one shaggy white brow, hammer on the ground in front of him. Jack must have told him she was around.
She waves to Reinhardt, who waves back but there is something in the thinness of his smile that suggests they will be having words. One faked death, perhaps, he would take with all joviality and forgiveness. Three is probably pushing it, and he liked Jack best anyway. More romantic than herself or Gabriel in his notions. More fond of chivalry.
She waves back once more making her leave to unpack. Fareeha guides her to her room, having changed into simple black on black training gear, in near silence. Her daughters steps drag a little, too tired. Ana almost offers her a drink, some reason for them to spend more time together, but mothering kicks in and she sends her away.
Fareeha plants a hand on her shoulder. “It is good to have you.” She smiles wearily, and without warning pulls her in for a hug.
Ana hugs her back and pretends she can’t feel the strength of the clutch.
After Fareeha leaves there is the matter of her room. In every Watchpoint there are two kinds of rooms. One set for the employees and one set for the oversight. Ana had expected Jack’s soldiering to kick in and throw her into one of the old barracks. Instead Winston’s fondness for finery has one out. She’s in one of the diplomats rooms, blue and green and peaceful, lacking either the grime of the barracks or the sterility of the officer accommodations. There is a single bed, already turned down with an unused tea set sitting in the middle. A table, a dresser. All luxuries after the years she’s had. She unpacks in relative peace. Mei comes by with a few beautiful lengths of silk for her. Ana has been rotating between two scarves since she was forced to abandon her pack when Talon came. Mei asks if she’d like help using them, it’s been a long time since she’s done it but her cousin converted for his wife and she learnt so she could be respectful. Ana declines but invites her back for tea some time later. Her cousin sounds like a friend of a relative from awhile back.
Fareeha comes by next with an invitation to tea.
Genji keeps a spot by some trees for meditation. It sits at the top of a hilly outcrop, the length of the Watchpoint and the surrounding mountains sweeping across her vision. Fareeha leads with her head tipped back. Strong chin. All inherited from decades of Amari blood. Ana is tired already.
They can’t find a conversation point. It swings from the tea, to Ana’s eye, to Fareeha’s feelings about soup, never hitting something that feels okay.
Fareeha sighs, placing her hand on top of her mother’s. “I want this too work.”
Ana grips back. “It will. Have you been to Moscow lately?”
Fareeha has. She likes the same restaurants as her mother but vehemently disagrees about the beer. German is better and not just because she had a crush on Reinhardt for the entire length of pre-pubescence. Ana reminds her of this, encouraging her daughter to hit back with the string of inconsistent lovers she had after the separation from her husband. There is a general agreement that the failed soccer star with tickets to every game was the winner. Some parts of their shared past, the non-Overwatch parts, hold happy memories for the both of them.
It comes back. Ana can’t separate Overwatch from her past.
Fareeha gets stuck on the recent mission. “What was the point?” Fareeha asks. “He could have killed us.”
“Lay of the land.” Ana shrugs. Easy enough when you know the man. “Now he knows that Jack has not changed.” And that Ana does not want to kill him.
Fareeha doesn’t look at her as she draws her own conclusions. Ana can’t read the pull of her eyebrows. She can’t map out her daughter like she could when she was a child.
It’s with great sadness that she begins to make peace with it. She killed a lot of things in her daughter when she made her choice but she is more and more extraordinary for it. Both of them probably would have preferred for her to stay but the world may have been poorer for it. You don’t get much choice in what makes you, just in what you do with it.
Ana is proud of her, always.
Ana spots Jack scuttling across the ground towards an old spot. Ana remembers it as a place to ask for forgiveness and in angrier moments to piss on the face of God. She clicks her tongue.
“Mother,” her daughter chides, “he is allowed some privacy.”
“You are too young to know how wrong you are.” Ana replies, somewhat saucily.
Fareeha rolls her eyes and drinks her tea.
Jack lopes down to the edge of the cliff, standing still, hunch backed. He’s got a flower in one hand, a fake one.
She remembers when they bought flowers for each other. Start of a bad joke: buying the funeral decorations before the hard missions, six or seven of them surrounded by hundreds of Omnics. Fake because they were blacked out half the time, no resupplies, certainly no funeral flowers. No ground support either, just carte blanche from the UN to do what they had to, to get the job done. No checks, no balances, no war crimes. That was it. The only way to win was to go back to the oldest methodology of murder. Endurance, patience, relentlessness. Hunting Omnics like a starving pack of wolves. So that’s what Gabriel had them do. That’s what Jack fought to make Gabe let go of. There’s a rabid wolves and tamed dogs metaphor just there for the taking, but it has been years, and Ana is tired of it.
It’s not a war of ideals between Jack and Gabe, it’s all the little details of waging it. Where the troops go, where the supplies go, what order you all stand in to get shot in the head by bureaucrats who’ve never had to take man or machine to pieces with just one shot.
Gabe insists she always took the wrong side, but she knew just as well as he did that some shots had to be fired, even when it took more and more of her soul to pull the trigger.
It’s an ephemeral difference that makes her choose where to stand. Jack is and always be a soldier but it took dying and coming back to teach him that he couldn’t subsist on faith. Gabe started with his eyes far too open, she hasn’t seen the dead version of him enough but he was always a little more like her. Ouroboros. Eaten and being eaten by what they were, what they could be, what they had to be instead. Ana cut off her own head and stepped out of the cycle. Jack will open his eyes everyday, smoke ringing in his ears, until he does too. It’s a flip of the coin at any given time with Gabriel, he is just as apt to try and pull a miracle out of his ass through sheer stubbornness as he is to walk away, either way Ana knows the cost of the choice. Years without her daughter, a million miles between her and an empty grave. The choice between burning and drowning comes down to one thing: would she rather hold her history in a war between two dead friends, or in the eyes of her child?
In a world of fire and ice Ana Amari chooses her cup of tea and the quiet company of her daughter.