a piece of me in your eyes (overwatch | ana/widowmaker)

[fiachairecht]

a piece of me in your eyes. overwatch, ana/widowmaker. ana rescues an injured widowmaker in cairo. 2.4k words, rated t. for bezukhovs in hurtcomfortex 2020.

Caring for someone who should be your enemy
Comforted by brainwashed loved one

The chill drifting through the warehouse's broken skylight cut straight to Ana's bones, no matter how tightly she pulled her cloak around herself. From her perch on top of a stack of crates she could see nearly the whole of the floor, and the modifications Sombra had made to her rifle's scope ensured that she could track anyone through the meagre cover afforded by the shelves.

But every time she raised the sights to her eye, she saw not the faint red heat-signature glimmers that would indicate approaching Talon agents but Sombra's face, brow creased in concern as she pressed Ana's rifle back into her hands.

The Widowmaker should be there. Hopefully alone.

Please, take care of her.

Ana could count on one hand — more likely, on one finger — the number of times Sombra had said that and not meant it as a euphemism for kill. And that made her more nervous than such an ostensibly simple mission should.

A soft click sounded beneath the noise of the wind, and Ana looked up to see a shadow disappearing into the rafters: the Widowmaker's grappling hook. She scanned the rest of the warehouse, but there was no other sound, no other light.

They would be alone. As it should be.

Ana waited, counted the spaces between her even breaths, and when she hit fifteen the shadow dropped back down, landing silent and out of Ana's sight a few aisles over. She waited to see if the Widowmaker would grapple up again, to a different section of the rafters, but there was nothing. So she was just surveying for herself, then, and not keeping guard for other soldiers. That would make Ana's job much easier.

She flicked her scope up just long enough to see the path the Widowmaker was taking before replacing her rifle on her back and making her way across the tops of the shelves, staying as close as she dared. The light filtering through from outside reflected off the Widow's Kiss and gave just enough information that she could follow without needing the scope — a job made easier by the fact that her target's caution seemed to have ebbed after her initial survey. She moved like she knew she wasn't being followed, or like she didn't care, and Ana's concern grew.

Amélie would never have been so confident, and the Widowmaker would never have been so careless. Doubt wormed its way into Ana's heart, the longer she watched: something's wrong, something's wrong, the certainty beating within her chest like a second heart the longer she followed Amelie. The longer she scanned the warehouse for something she couldn't name — for Talon troops, for something, anything that would explain why she was here. Anything that could have made Sombra sound nervous.

Perhaps that was why Ana was the first one to see it — the blinking white and red lights too high up to be floor lights but too low to be anything hanging from the ceiling. White and red in a familiar pattern, the countdown to a detonation that would—

She saw the moment the Widowmaker noticed. Saw her arms come up too late to shield herself from the blast.

And when she screamed Amélie's name in a useless warning, she saw the moment when Amélie's eyes held nothing but fear.

She waited just long enough to confirm that the blast hadn't triggered any further explosions, that it hadn't summoned anyone else, and then she climbed down as quickly as she could, making her way to the crumpled body on the ground and pulling her rifle from her back. The blast had thrown Amélie's body far enough that she wasn't in danger of being touched by any of the flames that were spreading down the aisle, lighting up shelves and boxes as they went, but she was so still that Ana knew even before she touched her that her injuries must be severe, no matter what Talon conditioning she had been subject to.

"Oh, Amélie," she murmured, kneeling beside her still body and gently brushing her hair away from her bruised face. "Amélie, what have they done to you now?"

Amélie didn't answer, didn't move, and Ana shut her eyes, feeling for Amélie's pulse in her wrist. For a long moment — too long, Ana would think later, impossibly long, she thinks now — there was absolutely nothing. And then, so faint she thought for a moment she was imagining it: a single heartbeat.

No one should be able to survive such a slow heartbeat, she thought, but Amelie's pulse was steady, and nothing like it should have been if she were alive — if she were truly Amélie again. So this was what being the Widowmaker had done to her — all of the changes Ana had feared during the long years since Amelie had disappeared from her flat in Paris given form in a glacial, thready heartbeat that could never be enough for the vivacious woman she used to know.

Ana opened her eyes when she felt Amélie's fingers against her own. Only the slightest hint of movement, not enough to confirm consciousness, but more than enough to confirm life, and Ana sighed in relief. "Can you move?"

Amélie groaned in response, her eyes rolling back in her head. Two thin trails of blood ran from the inside corners of her eyes, and Ana was surprised to see that it was still more red than blue, despite her skin. "Amélie. Can I move you? Is anything broken?" The fire was spreading around them, and they needed to be gone minutes ago — Ana needed to be gone minutes ago, before Hakim's men or the Widowmaker's backup team made their presence known — but she had the opportunity she'd been looking for for years.

She could take Amélie home.

Amélie was moving, trying to sit up, and Ana knew she had no other choice. She kicked enough debris aside that she could sit, and unloaded her rifle with steady hands. Too close to shoot, and she had no grenades, but moving Amélie without a full sense of her injuries was out of the question.

Amélie made only a token protest as Ana ejected the biotic dart from the chamber and slammed it none too gently into the hollow between her collarbones. Her body spasmed as the nanobots hit her system, and Ana pulled her close, her free arm wrapped tight around Amélie and pulling her close to her chest. Amélie was cold in defiance of the fire spreading around them, and they were rapidly running out of what time they had.

A quick glance down her body showed no other obvious injuries, but Amélie whimpered in pain nevertheless as Ana gathered her into her arms, stood and headed for the door. "I'm sorry, habibti," she murmured. "But this is for the best. Let's get you out of here." 

The Cairo streets were close to deserted, at this time of the morning, and Ana chose the streets, alleyways, and hidden stairs where Hakim's men and their police were least likely to be found. Still, she felt naked without her Bastet mask, and Amélie's heavy weight in her arms reminded her with every step what tonight's stakes were. Every time she turned a corner she fought the urge to bend and check that Amélie was still breathing.

When they passed the cafe that marked two street corners before home, Amélie's bloody fingers curled around her wrist. Her hand was freezing as it pressed against the bare skin between Ana's glove and the sleeve of her coat — colder than the dead, Ana would have said once, but death meant so much less and so much more these days.

It was less than breath, more than the stillness that had kept Ana's fear alive as they walked. "Almost home, Amélie," she murmured. Even as she spoke, she knew the words were more for herself than for Amélie. It was enough.

Back in the little flat that Ana had been renting, she laid Amélie down on her bed and stripped her with field-medic efficiency. Scars littered her naked body, surgical incisions and bullet wounds alike, and Ana felt her heart break all over again as she ran a careful hand down Amélie's arm. She was supposed to protect her from this kind of life — supposed to keep the world safe so Amélie could dance — and instead, over the years, both of them had forgotten what safety was.

The nanobiotics had done their work on the walk home, and the remaining injuries were easy enough to assess — less bruising than Ana had expected, a testament to Talon's experimentation. A broken ankle and bleeding eyes that couldn't possibly see anything, and that was all. Nothing that would last past the morning, but so much more than Amélie should have to bear.

She bandaged Amélie's eyes, with a strip of clean cloth, and headed for the small bathroom to retrieve more supplies. Stopped in the kitchen on her way back and turned the kettle on for a mug of mint tea, the closest thing to comfort she thought Amélie might accept. When she returned, two steaming mugs clasped in her hands, Amélie had moved enough to drag the covers partway up her body — a belated reaction to the chill, her modified body fighting to survive in any way it knew how.

The awful ice-blue of her skin couldn't hide the essential pieces of Amélie that still lived in her body — she still possessed the same grace and determination that had enraptured Ana years ago, still held herself as if she was watching the world fall at her feet and trying to decide if she hated it for doing so.

But her voice had gone as flat as her eyes and as cruel as her bullets, and it was that, more than anything, that Ana had grieved over the years even as she listened to surveillance recordings and yearned for even a single staticky word to prove that she'd been right to keep alive the hope that Amélie was still somewhere within Talon's brittle shell. Now, looking at the blinded woman in her bed, all she knew was that she loved her more than she had ever thought possible, no matter what she had become.

Ana broke one of the grenades against the side of Amélie's mug, let the medicine spill out into the tea. She sat at Amélie's bedside and ran her hands through her hair, traced each sharp bone in her bare arms and hands. The Widow's Kiss lay silent in the corner of the room, next to Ana's own rifle. She thought about turning on her computer, about warming up something to eat.

Tried to think about anything that would distract her from how much and how little would have to change for this scene to be domestic, instead of desperate, for their life together to be something real.

Amélie stirred sooner than she expected. Too soon — the nanobots did better work when she slept. But Ana cupped her cheek with a shaking hand, leaned forward to adjust the bandage across her eyes. "You're awake."

"Please don't cry." Of all the first words Ana had expected, she never would have guessed those. Amélie's sightless eyes rolled behind her closed lids, searching for Ana even as Ana blinked and only then realised that her cheeks were damp with tears. "Ana. I'm not going to kill you."

"No," Ana agreed, because it was easier than protesting that she hadn't been crying. That she hadn't known. "You are not going to do anything but rest. And — heal." Get better, she wanted to say, but how could she promise that?

"You did not kill me," Amélie's hand landed on Ana's knee, squeezing tightly. "Do not worry. You never did. Never could."

Why? The question lingered, unspoken, and perhaps Ana was imagining it or perhaps — perhaps something else had shaken loose in the warehouse, some part of Amélie that had been too long suffocated peering through the cracks of the new woman Talon had moulded around her heart.

Ana gave in, then, leaned down, brushed a comforting kiss against her forehead and lingered far longer than she had the right to. Amélie let her. "I thought you were dead," she said. "I should be the one to comfort you."

It wasn't until the words left her mouth that she realised they were true, in every sense — that though comfort was nearly as strange a concept these days as safety, Amélie's words brought a warmth to her chest that had nothing to do with the tea.

Had Amélie cried over her body, on the rooftops? Had the Widowmaker known her shot was so far off it could never guarantee a kill? Had she wanted to know—

"It does not matter," Amélie said. "I have been dead for too long for it to matter. Why did you follow me to Cairo?"

"You are many things, Amélie. Dead is not one of them." Amélie shook her head, her hair tangling against the pillow, and Ana reached over to help her sit, thankful, for the moment, that Amélie couldn't see how much her words had hurt.

She handed Amélie her tea, watched the other woman's lips twist in disgust as the medicinal aftertaste hit her tongue. "Like you said. I am not going to kill you."

Amélie raised an eyebrow, and the cloth over her eyes darkened with blood as the motion pulled open one of her cuts. "Then will you kiss me?"

It could be a dare. It could be a joke. It could be an admission, of a feeling the Widowmaker was not supposed to have and that Amélie had never named.

Too little possibility had never been their problem, but Ana was tired of waiting.

"Yes," she said. "For as long as you like."

She set her own mug aside and closed the small gap between them, pressing her lips to Amélie's. She tasted like medicine, like blood, and she gasped in surprise against Ana's mouth, like maybe she hadn't expected it after all. But before the uncertainty could take hold, Amélie lifted shaking hands to cup Ana's cheeks and kissed her back, and it was Amélie, and almost only Amélie, her frostbite skin the only sign of the Widowmaker as her tongue slipped past Ana's pliant lips.

"Is this what you need?" Amélie asked when she pulled back. "Is this what you need to believe I am alive? To feel better?"

No, Ana thought, and, yes, and, only if you can see me. "I think," she said, shifting to the bed so she could pull Amélie's body against her own, "I think that this is a start."