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Here comes a thought
WHO: Tekhartha Zenyatta and Widowmaker
WHAT: post-Recall Widowmaker was captured by Overwatch and in the process of being deprogrammed.
WARNING(S): TBD
Talon had become fat with overconfidence in the later years of Overwatch's disbandment. Any organization however deep their roots went or whomever at the top of global market backed them should pride itself on public image. Power was a performance piece, and they had bungled their grand finale. All it took was one lucky shot and the loss of one of their premier agents for the house of cards they built themselves on to start tumbling down. Somewhere in the middle the United Nations woke up and under a temporary dispensation of the PETRAS Act - Overwatch was granted sanction to act in the best interests of international security.
All because the infamous Widowmaker took a potshot to the temple. One bullet could change the world, and this one broke open a decades long conspiracy that shed light on what broke the pylons keeping the original Overwatch together.
"Surface level concerns we should treat the potential onset of bradycardia," A voice ran over her like the crashing of waves on distant shore - far off and muted, "As of now we know the extent of her mental condition and physical abnormalities are the direct result of research stolen from our Watchpoint in Stuttgart. She was given over the to the custody of Overwatch and it is our responsibility that perhaps one its victims be granted peace."
They were talking about her; the memories of being drugged and afraid laid buried over ten years ago resurfacing. Amélie was so tired she couldn't fight the roiling discomfort these thoughts caused her. Time slipped away and days became weeks became months. Sessions with a watery-eyed Dr. Ziegler who burdened all responsibility for her recovery like Atlas never made Amélie feel comfortable breezed by day by day. How are you today, Amélie? and Do your trigger words still induce a fugue state? or Let's check your heart rate.
The platitudes made her angry sometimes but she had to remind herself that even in this sterile prison in just a hospital gown at least she was still feeling something. One morning she even woke up to a box of petite madeleine pastries next to a cup of chamomile. Her favorites from a dredged up memory of a anniversary visits to Mariage Frères in Paris. The inclusion of tea led Amélie to believe this was Amari's attempt at a peace offering. It seemed these days people wanted to damn her in equal measure to those who wanted to apologize, or the very least reach out. Build bridges even if she was the fire stater.
"You have a visitor, Amélie." Again - Ziegler, crowding the doorway of her monitored room on Watchpoint Gibraltar - contained and watched like a wild animal - Amélie had to feign interest when she asked who. "I'll show him in."
Amélie's eyes widened in muted shock when she heard the low hum of anti-grav technology round the corner before she saw the omnic come into her room. In an instant her vision tunneled to her supposed finest kill over a year ago and, No - it couldn't be -
"...Mondatta?"
WHAT: post-Recall Widowmaker was captured by Overwatch and in the process of being deprogrammed.
WARNING(S): TBD
Talon had become fat with overconfidence in the later years of Overwatch's disbandment. Any organization however deep their roots went or whomever at the top of global market backed them should pride itself on public image. Power was a performance piece, and they had bungled their grand finale. All it took was one lucky shot and the loss of one of their premier agents for the house of cards they built themselves on to start tumbling down. Somewhere in the middle the United Nations woke up and under a temporary dispensation of the PETRAS Act - Overwatch was granted sanction to act in the best interests of international security.
All because the infamous Widowmaker took a potshot to the temple. One bullet could change the world, and this one broke open a decades long conspiracy that shed light on what broke the pylons keeping the original Overwatch together.
"Surface level concerns we should treat the potential onset of bradycardia," A voice ran over her like the crashing of waves on distant shore - far off and muted, "As of now we know the extent of her mental condition and physical abnormalities are the direct result of research stolen from our Watchpoint in Stuttgart. She was given over the to the custody of Overwatch and it is our responsibility that perhaps one its victims be granted peace."
They were talking about her; the memories of being drugged and afraid laid buried over ten years ago resurfacing. Amélie was so tired she couldn't fight the roiling discomfort these thoughts caused her. Time slipped away and days became weeks became months. Sessions with a watery-eyed Dr. Ziegler who burdened all responsibility for her recovery like Atlas never made Amélie feel comfortable breezed by day by day. How are you today, Amélie? and Do your trigger words still induce a fugue state? or Let's check your heart rate.
The platitudes made her angry sometimes but she had to remind herself that even in this sterile prison in just a hospital gown at least she was still feeling something. One morning she even woke up to a box of petite madeleine pastries next to a cup of chamomile. Her favorites from a dredged up memory of a anniversary visits to Mariage Frères in Paris. The inclusion of tea led Amélie to believe this was Amari's attempt at a peace offering. It seemed these days people wanted to damn her in equal measure to those who wanted to apologize, or the very least reach out. Build bridges even if she was the fire stater.
"You have a visitor, Amélie." Again - Ziegler, crowding the doorway of her monitored room on Watchpoint Gibraltar - contained and watched like a wild animal - Amélie had to feign interest when she asked who. "I'll show him in."
Amélie's eyes widened in muted shock when she heard the low hum of anti-grav technology round the corner before she saw the omnic come into her room. In an instant her vision tunneled to her supposed finest kill over a year ago and, No - it couldn't be -
"...Mondatta?"
pls excuse length
Curious to think, then, that he is one of their weaker links. They had sent Genji to inform him of Widowmaker's capture- presumably to mollify him, though the thought that he would need to be mollified is almost laughable now. What he'd felt in that moment was beyond words. Mondatta's death had returned to him with all the force of that first heartbreak, only to give way to pity, anger, relief- a breathless riot of emotions that twist his very soul into great, writhing knots. And instantly he'd known from that moment that he would never rest until he spoke to the woman himself.
Of course, he'd met some resistance: it was a difficult time; they needed his attention elsewhere; wait until they'd hunted down the last of Talon's dogs. But Zenyatta would not be swayed. For all he'd meditated on, for all he'd taught his student about forgiveness and release, he'd only ever dealt with abstracts himself. A general they, those who committed crimes against Omnics. But the wounds Widowmaker had inflicted upon him were still healing, and suddenly fate had seen fit to bring her to the very place he'd always believed would be a sanctuary.
Dr. Ziegler is just as reluctant, at first. But she trusts him, and feeds him news of her progress, little by little, until the day arrives when she is well enough to meet.
As Zenyatta crosses the threshhold his resolve wavers, and at the sight of her he almost turns back- not for fear of her, but for fear of what might lie within him. Then Widowmaker, who is called Amélie after all- he has been briefed, given the details of her sorry history- opens her mouth, and she calls him Mondatta.
The universe contracts to a corridor from the doorway to the bed, as though illuminated by a single shaft of light. Motor, feedback, synaptic: all internal functions seem at once to cease save for his physical receptors, which whirr to life with painful hyper-sensitivity. For one dreadful moment he's sure he hates her, the woman in the bed with the wide, staring eyes, still dangerously pale, her lips parted with accusation and confusion. But beneath that- he can feel it, it is almost palpable- is fear.
She looks as though she's seen a ghost.
Just as quickly as he's overcome the wave retreats. Looking at her exhausts him, but he only has to look at her to know the effect he must be having on her.
"No. Not Mondatta." Would that he were. Mondatta, he is sure, would not hesitate. As it is Zenyatta has to force himself to move closer, as though he were approaching a caged tiger. "I am Tekhartha Zenyatta. We we- we are brothers in the Iris."
no subject
The case of Amélie Lacroix was textbook in the sense that in years to come her name would spark a classroom bloodbath from political psychologists to law graduates to the bored college professors trying to impart the ground level of human nature. Debate if her amnesty was just or not would rage well after she was gone. You just never get a case like this, Amélie remembered one UN representative saying. That was all hypothetical and nothing she would personally be held under scrutiny for.
This was the present and right now, someone directly impacted by her actions was staring her down. Her mouth went dry but otherwise she schooled the flicker of fear in her eyes to something more stolid. Making herself look indifferent was easy now, after all the practice she's had. Even now she still didn't know where Amélie ended and Widowmaker began.
The neural conditioning went deep but after over a decade even when the strings are cut - somethings linger. Sometimes Amélie felt as though she were haunting herself; a ghost inside her own head. She constantly had to remind herself that she was still herself that I and myself began and ended with Amélie, and that no one here wanted to kill her. Not with Dr. Ziegler watching, anyone. Though she suspected this - this Tekhartha Zenyatta was as monastic as the next Shambali. More concerned with being labeled a hypocrite than a murder in their adherence to nonviolence.
"I would like to walk." Amélie said - addressing Ziegler first and already looking set on getting out of bed.
This prompted the good doctor to fuss over her; pulling IVs and asking if she would need a sweater. The weather outside was tepid but in her weakened physiology you could never be to careful, etc. etc.
"D'accor, d'accor." Amélie had a voice like birdsong when it wasn't so snide.
She waved Ziegler off and got to her own two feet. To even prove a point against suspected entropy, when Amélie stood she moved her slender feet to stand en pointe. Angela wasn't amused and advised against it, but eventually left them alone. A glance cast warily between them before departing as she wasn't sure where to cast either her concern, or her loyalties when looking between patient and friend.
"Everyone has either yelled, cried, or said nothing at all," Amélie said as stood near the bed - for all the time she spent in it her posture was as elegant as ever, like a porcelain dancer on a music box. "You seem to be the last in line."
She didn't know what else to say than comment upon how overdue this encounter must seem to the both of them. Eyes that had started to return to their natural hazel flickered to the window overlooking to coastline before fixing back on the omnic.
"I said I wanted to walk," She looked back at Zenyatta, "So let's walk."
no subject
"There is a time for silence," he answered. "I am incapable of producing tears, and unwilling to yell." A pause. "Walking seems a fair alternative."
And so he touched his feet to the floor and allowed them to lead the two of them to the hallway, hoping that the reminder of gravity might ground his uncertainty. Stood like this, side by side, it did not surprise him as much as it should have done to learn that she probably stood an inch or so taller than him; what might have been intimidating once, however, had shrunk along with the woman herself. Next to his solid steel she seemed impossibly frail, every bit the invalid Dr. Ziegler sees in her every day. But then, Dr. Ziegler was a consummate professional. Zenyatta still found himself thinking that those long, pale hands put a bullet through his brother's head.
No. Enough.
He promised to speak.
As the door closed unwillingly behind them Zenyatta did not look at her, even askance, for fear that it might further tangle his thoughts before they were spoken. If he could not spread his arms so easily then he wanted to begin in simplicity, and in humility.
"It seems we walk as strangers. Shall I call you Amélie or Madame Lacroix?" Or Widowmaker, he added silently, knowing he need not say it aloud. Ordinarily he would have used her given name without a moment's thought- he had even unthinkingly called Junkrat my friend at one point- but every word between them had weight.
no subject
"Votre français, très bien!" Her eyes seemed to light up like a cat whose attention was fixated on something to pounce on. "But am I 'madame,' not mademoiselle?"
The joke seemed distantly cruel, even for her. Like she was playing with her own feelings to incite a reaction from the monk. Using the part of her identity that was true and stuck to her like an old wound - widow - was double-edged. Even after she made the remark she seemed to wither away from any follower up. Not looking for a reaction; shoulders hunched as they walked.
Amélie had relented so far as to wear a sweater; a chunky cotton thing emblazoned with Overwatch's logo that her frail body practically swam in. She felt tarred and feathered in the damn thing, but at least she was warm. She would get so cold now, and on a steady diet of a droperidol and clonazepam cocktail waxed and waned in her waking hours like constantly in a fugue. The two of them, murderer and victim of her aftermath, walked in relative silence out into the hall. Occasionally she looked over at Zenyatta as if curiously drawn in by the sight of the omnic walking unassisted by his anti-grav capabilities.
"Amélie."
It was barely above a whisper and almost lost to the rushing tide below them as the pair stepped out onto the airfield. In the natural light the bruise-like circles under her eyes seemed to darken and whatever venomous mirth was to be found dangle an old adversary on a string diminished. Now she was just a frail young woman; bundled up to a chill only she felt. At the tender mercies of what was surely to be an awkward conversation.
"If I can ask for nothing else then I would like to hear my own name for the remainder of the evening," She intoned. "But what do I call you? Tekhartha Zenyatta is...comment dit-on, a mouthful."
no subject
Then, silence. They walked together for a while, the ghost in borrowed clothes and the ghost in the machine, side by side like a pair of mute twins. Even with his head down he felt her eyes drawn to him, almost childlike in their curiosity. But the hallway suddenly felt a stifling place for the two of them to be. Nothing of any real meaning was ever spoken in a hallway, was it? An inbetween space. Goodness only knew, the air between them was thick enough already with apprehension.
As they stepped outside he felt the air rush to greet them in a cool sigh, along with a wave of relief- and her voice.
Amélie.
His head tilted, ever so slightly, in her direction. Sunlight, even faded sunlight, seemed to pick out everything the halogens missed or disguised: the hollows under her eyes and cheeks, the delicacy of her features, as if picked out in fine china, the broken skin of her lip. Zenyatta could not describe what he felt then as pity, but it was something akin to it, something softer and warmer that flooded his systems with unexpected warmth. His first impulse was to touch her shoulder, but the moment was fragile, still, tangled behind even his good will in the bloodied web of their pasts.
With a small nod, he instead followed the second. "Of course. Call me Zenyatta, Amélie." And it was her name. To decide on it now, he'd already realised, was to pass his first judgement. He would puzzle over that later. For now, he raises a hand in a loose wave and directs a ball of golden energy from one orb to her side. "This will ease some of the discomfort. It is not as potent as Mercy's medicine," he admitted quietly, "but it will suffice, I hope."
The first peace offering. He hadn't expected it to come so soon.
no subject
Within that over sized sweater was her own haunted house; dust covered and complete with jump scares. Amélie tensed with squared shoulders and a jaw set at a ninety degree angle whenever Zenyatta wandered in too close. Or even when the ocean breeze blew too loud up the cliff side. Her entire comportment was a tripwire drawn up tight just edging closer to explosion. Or implosion. Once you there was utter surety in your own self-destruction the collateral damage or frightening lack there turned into semantics.
They came to stop where the airfield ended and the dusty trails leading down the cliff sides began. Amélie had he chin tucked into the loose collar of her sweatshirt with bangs obscuring the dying light that made her blink away its glare glittering across the ocean.
When the orb comes - well - into her orbit she went tense only to feel almost every muscle in her body slacken. In another time - through the scope of her rifle - she remember another one of the omnic's devices sticking to her. This one much different and causing her to panic like a fox ready to gnaw its own leg out of a trap. Amélie suspected that what Zenyatta employed to harm and heal were sound-based on a low-frequency outside human hearing. She could recall the roiling the nausea and paranoia that enemies somehow moved unseeing between the saccades of her shaken, violet-tinged vision.
This was different. She still could not hear a thing but one had to experiencing the becalming for themselves to register that same, gentle white noise effect. Hurts seemed to no long drag shallowly like cat claws on her frayed nerves and the weariness from the drugs pumped into her rapidly dissipated. In this newfound alertness the hazy veil of the last several years piled on a daunting recovery period rolled away. The wool quite literally pulled away from her eyes and something seemingly insignificant came rushing back.
"Gérard brought me here once," Her own voice sounded muted - far off. "Some hail and farewell for a section commander or some such. It was all very dull...but I remember."
A pale, slightly discolored hand pointed to a natural alcove in the cliffs some several yards off. "There was a bonfire there and-" She pointed to the shore. "Amari and the German sang some god awful song there. I can barely recall the rest we were all so drunk by the end of it I scarcely recall who we were even there for. But-"
With a swell of anxiety in her chest that twisted between her ribs she came to the sinking realization that those memories were fading away. Something else surgical cut out of her and only now could she give a shit. Hands shake and drawn back to her chest, Amélie watched the sun setting beneath the waves blur and distort. Fat tears welling up in her eyes; every blinking sending them down her face.
"Désolée," She shook with the delayed reaction of true regret as Zenyatta's white noise lulled her into real vulnerability, "désolée..."
Amélie sank into herself like a dying star; a celestial chemical factory brought to its knees in the vacuum of isolated space. Head bowed and hunched over she kept repeating her apologies to everyone and no one until the tears soaked through the knees of cheap cotton sweats. Racked with sobs as she rocked herself; comforted by nothing not even memory.
I RETURN
Then she raises her hand, and speaks, and though he knows the feeling is without physiological basis it is as though the delicate inner workings of his chest have been compressed. Following the line of her finger, beautifully slender but for the broken stub of her nail, he peers into the cliffside. He imagines Ana there, Reinhardt, the lean, clever figure of a man he will never meet. Between them all...
Fear shocks through him but it's like a knife in someone else's back, once removed but no less vivid for it. He's still making sense of the tangle of emotions suddenly welling up within her when the words, the word, comes choking out of her, some half-drowned thing in the midst of her tears.
And all the resistance left inside of him crumbles and blows away before the broken woman curled up before him: a woman who's suffered for every sin her hands have been made to commit. All but on her knees, weeping her contrition. There's only so much an orb can do- only so much words can say.
"Amélie..." His voice is barely audible above the wind. But above it comes the soft, rhythmic chime of his orbs, even as he finds himself falling beside her as moonlight on the breaking tides. His hands find her shoulders, one arm stretched across her back- her thin, fragile back- and gently, gently, eases her into his shoulder.
no subject
She crumbles the same way anyone falls. There is a ice cold stab low in her stomach as all foundation is swept out from under her before its rushing up to meet her. And like someone falling in a dream, she gasps and startles before fatal impact. Sputtering words and shallow breathes against a metal shoulder.
The embrace that pulled her from the brink had none of the give or radiated warmth of a person. Only there was something distinctly nostalgic about the hum ringing in her ears, and smooth surface pressed to her cheek. To the point of pain.
"Get this- get this off me," Amélie swatted at the orb only for it to come back to her like a tetherball. In her mad scramble she dislodged herself from Zenyatta's embrace. Falling back on her haunches to sit on her heels. Even distraught, her sensibilities would not let her be clumsy.
Chest heaving and her eyes rimmed with a burning red halo there was no pretending she was fine. That this was all something she could laugh off. When evasion and downright cruelty failed her, Amélie suddenly felt so liberated as to almost feel entrapped by it. Enough that she could just speak her mind.
"Gérard..." She started. Legs curled to her chest where she hooked her chin in the cradle of her knees. Line of sight set on the darkening shore beyond the cliff side. "He was always so critical of you, the Shambali.
We met - he and I - my first year at Panthéon-Sorbonne when he was a guest speaker. He hovered around me as a moth to a flame, that I remember most of all. I was a very charmed by it despite the controversy at the time. There's something very attractive about someone with much on their mind, isn't there?"
Amélie sat up straighter and the queue of dark hair spilled from her shoulders down her back like a ink spill down white paper.
"As we got closer I remember he always laughed off the Nepalese omnics in their more nascent years whenever they cropped up in the news," She laughed but the sound was hollow. "Celibates who know nothing of the beauty in the mess they look down on from the mountaintop."
She hunkered down again.
"He would not have a kind for you I'm afraid," She said. "He was very Parisian, after all."
no subject
It seemed in those moments that this would be as far as they would go today- that she would clamp down into silence again, wan and weary. Yet her lips parted, and, falteringly, came that name again, and another story to match it. This one lacked the definition of the last, appearing, in Zenyatta's imaginings, as something curious and romantic, a modern fairytale. Of course they met in Paris.
Perhaps he imagined too deeply. Only as his disdain for the Shambali cropped up again did he hear what Amélie had left unspoken all this time. That it wasn't human distaste or apathy- was it?
"Gérard... he was an omnic?" It came out as far more of a question than it ever needed to be. Instinct already insisted that he was right. Yet he still found himself peering at the woman, still in his surprise, as though he had been paused mid-sentence.
Why had no one told him? Probably it hadn't occurred to them; Widowmaker's past crimes wouldn't have interested him, before now. Yet from where he stood now it seemed to make all the difference. The death of a human, the death of an omnic... one was no better or worse than the other, no, but... his thoughts rioted.
His hands must have felt like death to her. They curled up reflexively, as if to snatch back the ghost they could so easily have ushered in.