Here comes a thought

[venimeuse]

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?"

Comments

I RETURN

[tekhartha]

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.

[venimeuse]

What surprised Amélie herself was how receptive she was to - to...whatever it was Zenyatta foisted upon her with a mere flick of his wrist. One would think after a half-life dancing on strings she would be more resistant to someone getting in her head. Then again, it could be more causative than preventive. All Overwatch had done in deprogramming her was leaving the front door to a haunted house unlocked and wide open for scavengers and the curious.

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."

[tekhartha]

Amélie tolerated his presence for far longer than he had expected of her- and then she shuddered, so violently he feared she might rattle herself apart. But she didn't. She heaved herself away from him with enough force to momentarily unbalance him, even as she landed on her toes as nimbly as a cat. Her eyes landed on him only briefly, saucer-wide and distant, before her head dropped onto her knees as if under the weight of its thoughts.

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.