This was not the first time Zenyatta had watched a lost soul accept their first brush with the Iris, and, in the aftermath of the loss and chaos of the past year, he doubted that she would be the last. But even he had not anticipated that Amélie would feel it so abruptly, or with such acuity; one moment she's rigid, the next she's loose and almost dazed, were it not for the way her pupils shrink and focus to laser-like precision.
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.
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.