one more wrong (overwatch | ana/widowmaker)

[fiachairecht]

one more wrong (come back). overwatch, ana/widowmaker. memory, existential crises, waiting for a future the widowmaker isn't sure she wants. 1.6k words, rated t. for press_start_comm 2019.

Bang.

One heartbeat, and another. The last of the 1500 meter targets cracks perfectly down the centre.

The Widowmaker flips her visor up and regards the empty practise range with her own critical, unaugmented gaze. She had never needed the visor in the early days, and though Amélie was long gone by the time Reyes gifted it to her, the Widowmaker still knew a bribe when she saw one.

Outside the enhanced heat sensors of her lenses, the training field is green. A light mist still clings to the grass, not yet burnt away by the early morning sun. The remains of her targets, bot and wood alike, lie in neat lines against the chalk marks where they fell.

The whole scene feels … familiar. It nudges at something in the hollow space between her shoulder blades where Amélie used to live, the space that's getting harder and harder to ignore.

The Widowmaker watches her broken targets and breathes in time with the heartbeat the makes her no longer Amélie. The metal of her visor is cool at her temples. Metal. Cybernetics. Cybernetic eye. Sniping with a cybernetic eye. Ana.

Ana comes to her thoughts more and more often, these days. The Widowmaker comes to the practise range when it is deserted, no one to intrude on her or her thoughts, but ever since the most recent intelligence about what some in Talon are delicately calling the reformation, Ana Amari has come unbidden to shoot with her.

Amélie used to yearn for her. In the early days of her time at the fringes of Overwatch, the thing that had been a heart leapt to see Ana in the mess hall, in the shooting gallery, fixing Angela's earpiece or smiling at Gerard. In the early days of her time with Talon, she had dreamed of pressing the gun Ana had taught her to handle to her forehead.

You didn't save me, she would say.

And now you cannot even save yourself.

She would pull the trigger. She did not love Ana, not like Amélie had. Ana, she thinks, loves them both. That is Ana's burden to bear, and the Widowmaker does not like looking too closely at why she finds the thought of being loved to be something that feels like killing.

The Widowmaker returns inside. Strips her gun and cleans the parts. Just like Ana taught her.

**

They let her out more often, these days. On her own, even, without Sombra to watch her from the shadows and without Doctor O'Deorain on her arm. They think the spider will always crawl home to the centre of her web deep inside the compound. Talon made her. She wonders sometimes if they are forgetting that that is all that they can lay claim to. They have no idea how far through France and beyond her web stretches, how many safe places she's made her own.

Somewhere deep in the graveyards of Cairo, Ana had a made a web of her own. The Widowmaker had visited it, one day after Ana had left it for good. Much of the Necropolis was sealed, but not from her. The Widowmaker had stood at the top of the crumbling stairwell, dropped her visor and let light reveal what the Shrike had never thought to hide from her.

A bed, neatly made. Glasses on a table: two, like someone else had been there, and the desire to kill that that thought had provoked was entirely unplanned. Barren shelves, hugging dusty corners.

The Widowmaker had surveyed the ruins of the Necropolis and thought:

Yes.

I could make a home here.

It had been a flight of fancy, and even then she had known better than to dwell. Ana would not have taken her back, not without imagining her to be Amélie instead. It would only have lead to more pain for both of them: a feeling that the Widowmaker can identify from a distance and often desires to cause.

But she hadn't wanted to cause that sort of pain. The Necropolis air was warm like Ana's hands, and something that was not a heart was unfurling in her chest.

She went back to Paris, to the cafe that had been Amélie's favourite. She wrote a letter, pen on paper: I know.

So perhaps it had returned to Ana via the bodies of Overwatch field agents. Perhaps Ana's letter in return had passed over the bodies of men whose services Talon would no longer make use of.

The paper sits in the Widowmaker's ammunition pouch. She unfolds and folds and unfolds it whenever she remembers Overwatch.

She has never read it.

**

So there is the world, and there is the Widowmaker, and it is hers, if she would like.

She does not like. Liking is not so far removed from her as wanting, but she has always had other things to spend her energy on. Today, and every day since Cairo: keeping Ana where she belongs.

On the training range, she brings down the 1500 meter targets consistently. Eternally, and if she is very still, if she listens to her breath, the wind, the thing that used to want to be a heart, she can prevent the boredom from settling in.

She moves to 2000 meter targets, the ones Amélie had watched Ana practise on and never dreamed she herself would sit in front of. And yet the Widow's Kiss does not miss a mark: she has built it too carefully for that. The Widowmaker wonders if Doctor O'Deorain built her with the same care. If Ana would have built her with the same care.

The Widowmaker does not watch the news anymore. If Talon needs her to know something for an operation, they will tell her. If she wants praise for a kill, she asks herself what she did well, what she must repeat.

The Widowmaker no longer think about what Ana might have said. How Ana might have praised her, scolded her, hated her. Ana's lessons were never supposed to lead to this.

But they have.

And the Widowmaker is grateful, even if Amélie would have mourned what had become of her, and of them.

**

Ana's hands were on Amélie's the first time she brought down something that looked human. Ana's lips were against her ear. A single word would have been enough to disturb the air, to make her shot miss, so Ana did not speak.

Nor did she pull the trigger. That was left to Amélie, and even then she had known that the cry of the training bot as it exploded affected them both.

Later, when Ana's hands were no longer on a gun, they had made Amélie hot chocolate and stroked her hair as she sobbed with the mingled grief and euphoria of killing.

This is our world now, Ana had said.

This is our responsibility.

Are you ready?

Amélie had nodded, then, lips brushing against Ana's neck and hot tears soaking through the shoulder of Ana's sweatshirt. She wasn't ready at all, the Widowmaker knows now, but she would have said yes to anything Ana asked.

The Widowmaker does not cry anymore, but she wonders if Ana would hold her now if she did.

**

But she is alone. It does not matter what Ana would do, because Ana is not here, and it does not matter that the Widowmaker asks herself this question every day, because it is necessary to know the mind of one's enemy.

Sniping is patience. Sniping is prediction.

And yet she had failed to predict that, given the chance, the single shot the Widowmaker took against Ana Amari would be non-lethal. Just a fracture to an electronic eye.

Now you see me.

Please don't see what I have become.

The Widowmaker still sees Ana every time she kills. Ana's face, covered in blood. Ana, in front of her where she never should have been.

Ana behind her. Ana's fingers on her fingers on the trigger.

Everything the Widowmaker had become was built upon the foundations laid by Ana's early love, Ana's first lessons. They had had the words for loneliness then, but never used them right. Perhaps things would have been different if they had.

Now, the Widowmaker is losing her taste for loneliness, the one Amélie had never had. Talon would be disappointed. Ana might proud.

The Widowmaker is.

Amélie is.

They are all that exist in the now. 2.30am in the middle of Gare d'Annecy, waiting to see if the SNCF's new line from Geneva will live up to its potential.

It is easier to think that she is waiting for a train than to think she is waiting for Ana Amari, if Ana is even going to come for her.

The Widow's Kiss is at home, tucked safely in her bed. They both know she doesn't need it to kill, but perhaps this is a sign of—

Of Amélie. Of a defined absence of the want to kill, rather than the numb entirety of absence that has been her only companion for so long. Of something coming back.

She wants to see if Ana will step off the train. She wants to know what she will do. What Ana will know.

The Widowmaker thinks that if she finds out tonight, perhaps, she will then want other things. If not, it is no matter.

It is summer in Annecy, and her hands are growing warm to match the wind that does not quite touch the thing inside her chest that wants to remember what it was like to be a heart.

She is very good at waiting.