When I was a girl, I had a fear of spiders.
This is known, a matter of public record. It is part of Widowmaker's villainous monologues, the old and artless trope of mastering the thing you fear and thereby gaining its ability to inspire dread. Soon-to-be tortured hostages, old Overwatch foes, new Talon recruits: for being such a recluse, she's told them all about spiders and heartbeats and death.
What I don't tell people, the fact that isn't part of the Widowmaker persona, is that this fear persisted into adulthood.
Gérard, bless his soul, never made light of my fears. "Mon amour," he would say, trapping some hideous bug between a tumbler and his newspaper, "fear is a healthy thing." And when he came back from tossing the spider on the lawn, he would wrap his arms around me and whisper in my ear, "Amélie, you are so brave and so smart. If you were not afraid of spiders, what use would I be to you?"
We shared many things, but none as personal as our fears. I'm not even certain that he told Dr. Zielger he suffered from cauchemars—night terrors and sleep paralysis, terrible waking moments where his mind was conscious but his body frozen.
We visited the restored Louvre, once. I remember how animated he became when he saw Fuseli's The Nightmare. Apparently, cultures all across the globe share stories of malefic beings that steal through the night and perch on your chest, crushing the life out of you while your immobilized body cannot respond. He was so happy to share, to take this moment of personal misery and make it into something that brought us closer together.
I loved Gérard for many reasons, but his ability to find greatness in the terrible was his most endearing trait.
I don't know how Talon knew. Like I said, our fears were personal, ours. But it was not enough that Gérard die. No, he had made Talon suffer. His death needed to be artful, personalized, tailored to his specific fears. And so I watched out of foreign eyes as she drugged him with a paralytic agent, moved with alien limbs as she climbed on to his chest, felt as a stranger's hands wrapped around his throat and strangled the light out of his eyes.
But of course, it wasn't a stranger. No night hag snuck into our bedroom and took my love.
It was my hands that killed my husband. And not a day goes by that I don't fantasize about wrapping those same hands around her throat.