Well this is a surprise. The first fic I write in four years and it's not even HTTYD. I feel like a traitor.
Since this is my first foray back into writing fanfiction in so long, I'm trying something slightly different - each chapter of this is going to get its very own song. I'll try and keep the songs fairly relevant to the themes of the chapter, or at least tangentially related. You can listen to them before starting the chapter, during the chapter as background music, or at the end of the chapter. Or, if you so choose, you can just not listen at all - it's completely optional and probably doesn't really add anything of value to the experience. And then there's always the distinct possibility that you'll just hate my music choices, which is fair too. I have awful taste in music.
Please do let me know what a horrible writer I am by leaving a comment or something, that sort of thing is very very much appreciated. Or if you've found one of the inevitable plotholes, or if the foreshadowing is too ridiculously obvious and hamfisted. Or if you think the character portrayals suck, or if the chapter was too long or short, or if it was simply boring. And last but definitely not least, tell me if you enjoyed it. I need all the encouragement I can get :')
I'll try to update this fic fortnightly, but university life is tricky.
Oh, and thanks to SheepMolestor for proofreading, even though you're ambivalent towards Overwatch lore and utterly despise fanfiction. Merci.
~ NeedsAdjustment
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Song: RIP - Olivia O'Brien
2077
Lena Oxton weaved through the crowded footpaths of inner-city London, dodging grumpy early-morning commuters and bickering schoolkids. The reassuring weight of her chronal accelerator hummed steadily from inside her backpack, close enough to anchor her to the present but inconspicuous enough that she could pretend to be just another jogger. She was, now, technically, a wanted criminal. After she'd publically violated the Petras Act for the second time by appearing as Tracer at Tekhartha Mondatta's last speech, the UN had issued a brief statement painting her as a dangerous and radical vigilante at best, and a cold-blooded murderer at worst. She'd tried to be as stealthy as possible, considering the circumstances, but too many of the public had seen the telltale flashes of blue from her rooftop fight with Widowmaker. She sped up slightly, feeling the burn in her lungs. That had been the second Overwatch mission she'd taken part in after the Recall. The first mission she'd failed.
"No worries love, I'll be fine!" she'd laughed when Winston had suggested that Genji or McCree could turn up at the speech as backup. "I'm already in London, no need'ta send them over!" How wrong she'd been.
She subconsciously sped up again, the pavement beneath her feet blurring. She'd been so stupid. Engaging Widowmaker too early, ruining the element of surprise. Getting too close too quickly, rather than drawing out the fight. And, if she was really honest, she hadn't been going for the kill. Despite all the deaths, despite all the conflict, even despite Gérard's murder, Lena had still been hoping that the spark of her former best friend was somewhere beneath the stone-cold Talon assassin known as Widowmaker. Mondatta had died because of that foolish hope.
Widowmaker had fired the killing shot, and Lena had instinctively Recalled out of the bullet's path. If she hadn't, Mondatta might've have gotten to safety. Instead, she'd emerged on the rooftop just in time to see the Shambali monk crumple to the ground, the lights of his eyes flickering out. Lena had turned and grappled Widowmaker to the ground, hot tears fogging the inside of her goggles. "WHY?" she'd screamed down at the purple-skinned assassin. And, for a fleeting moment, a moment that plagued her even more than the assassination she'd failed to stop a few moments earlier, she could have sworn she'd seen the scared face of Amélie Lacroix stare back at her. She'd paused, eyes widening, but then Widowmaker had smirked and whatever Lena had thought she'd seen was gone. They'd had a brief skirmish, Widowmaker escaping to a waiting Talon dropship and Lena too stunned to pursue, almost too stunned to evade the police as they finally reached the scene. She'd stumbled to an Overwatch safehouse and collapsed on the threadbare carpet, her mind whirling with anger and shame, hope and horror.
It shouldn't have been possible, of course. A trick of the light, perhaps. Talon's neural conditioning was said to be absolute, and indeed Widowmaker's actions were ample proof of that. Why was she still entertaining the idea that Amélie Lacroix might still be hidden somewhere inside Widowmaker? That kind of thinking had compromised the mission; it had gotten Mondatta killed.
Lena blinked her eyes twice, forcing herself back to the present just in time to narrowly avoid a small group of teenagers meandering along the footpath. She slowed, taking a second to orient herself around her surroundings, and then bit back a curse. She'd managed to cover the last kilometre or so in under two minutes, which meant she'd have been running at Olympic speeds. Or faster. Even without the telltale glow of the accelerator or the short-range teleportation, she had no doubt that anyone seeing her would've put two and two together. So much for staying inconspicuous. She glanced behind her and saw the same group of teens staring at her in shock.
"Nice day for a run, innit?" she chirped, trying for an embarrassed smile that probably looked more like a grimace. One of the teens pulled his phone out of his pocket and started to tap at it frenetically, glancing up quickly to check that she was still there. Probably trying to open the camera app, she guessed, or, worse, alerting the boys in blue.
Bloody excellent.
She threw up the hood of her running jacket hastily, and ducked into an alley. It was empty, thankfully, so she wasted no time in ripping her backpack open and shaking her chronal accelerator free. It was a bulky device, but Lena had mastered the art of putting it on in the least amount of time possible. Legs here, arms here, and then two quick pulls on the straps to cinch the accelerator to her chest. It flared brighter, the internal electronics synchronizing to her central nervous system, and illuminated a patch of graffiti on the wall. Lena had dabbled briefly with graffiti as a rebellious teenager, and so she took a moment to appraise the skull motif and accompanying tag spraypainted onto the grey brick. Neat , she thought, and blinked to the top of the building. And then blinked down to the ground to retrieve her discarded backpack, and then back up again all in the span of a second.
Using her powers was so easy now, as intuitive as flexing a limb. After the Slipstream incident which had suspended her in the timestream for nearly three months, she'd been loath to test the chronal accelerator's abilities. Why would she have wanted to go back to that awful limbo, trapped somewhere in between the past and the future? Her therapist at the time, one of the many civilians working for Overwatch, had recommended strongly that Lena should face her fears and start using the accelerator properly.
"You could take back your life," he'd enthused. "You could be a hero again, Lena. Wouldn't you like that?" In hindsight, the encouragement had been painfully transparent, probably the result of some higher-up trying to get Lena back into active duty. Still, it had worked. She'd approached Winston the following day and he'd set up a testing environment in one of the Blackwatch training areas. The first time she'd tried blinking, dressed in her flight costume, she'd done it from a running start and ended up slamming into the far wall, not realizing that momentum would be conserved. It had been painful, but as she picked herself up off the ground she'd realized that it hadn't felt frightening, or alien. It had felt like flying.
And that's what she was doing now, her feet barely touching the rooftops as she ran. Her chronal accelerator had sat unused for almost a month after Mondatta's death, as she'd been too grief-stricken to even leave her apartment. She'd missed the exhilaration though, the wind whipping through her hair and the slight fuzz at the edges of her vision as the chronal accelerator pulled her in and out of the timestream. She'd made it halfway back to her apartment when it began to dim slightly, so she stopped a moment to let it recharge. With mild surprise she realized the rooftop she was currently standing on was the same one where she and Widowmaker had fought nearly a month ago. It should've been swept clean by detectives and London's police department after the incident, but Lena let out a morbid chuckle as she bent down to pick up the twisted leg of a venom mine. She rolled the slender piece of metal between her fingers, fighting back memories as they threatened to overwhelm her. Her accelerator gave a soft beep, the light shining brightly again, and she hesitated slightly before tucking the leg into her jacket pocket and setting off again.
She made it back to her apartment within a few more minutes, sliding down a drainpipe and then blinking through the open window of her bedroom. She unhooked the straps of her accelerator and hung the device on a hook on the wall. The apartment had several anchor points embedded in the walls, meaning she didn't have to carry the accelerator around inside. She slipped off her running shoes, stretching a hand out to swipe the TV remote off a dresser. She turned it on, and was entirely unsurprised to find an out-of focus picture of herself being displayed across the morning news. The speed at which news networks could find and capitulate on possible headlines these days was entirely unfair, she thought, changing into normal clothes while keeping one eye on the screen.
" - the police have not yet responded to our request for a statement, but I think it's safe to say that that is indeed Tracer in the flesh," stated a sharp-looking newscaster, flashing a smile at the camera. His counterpart, a suited Omnic, gave an exaggerated shrug.
"If it indeed is her, John, that probably spells trouble for London. Overwatch agents are all dangerous individuals, and Tracer in particular has been labeled as a wanted vigilante after her involvement at the Mondatta tragedy," he said. Lena rolled her eyes. It was... depressing, to say the least, to see Overwatch being painted in such a negative light after all it'd done.
"Lena, is that you?" a voice rang out from downstairs. Damn. She flicked the TV off guiltily, hoping Emily hadn't been checking the news.
"Yeah love, don't worry," she called back. "Thought you'd be at work by now." Suppressing a sigh, she pulled on a T-shirt. Emily and her were in a precarious state, if she was honest - they had been ever since Winston had recalled Overwatch agents to Watchpoint: Gibraltar. She'd brought up the possibility of moving to the military base one night, over dinner, and Emily had nearly bitten her head off.
"You said you were done with that life," she'd scowled. "Overwatch is in the past." Lena had protested weakly, but acquiesced. She hadn't mentioned it again, instead running small, local scouting and intel missions for Winston behind Emily's back. Until Widowmaker had shown up at Mondatta's speech. That mission, the one she'd failed so spectacularly, had been impossible to keep a secret. They'd fought, then, Lena too raw and bubbling with emotion to hold back words that she'd never have said otherwise. Emily had moved out of the apartment for a whole week, and when she'd returned they hadn't really spoken to each other for another two. The tensions had eased slightly since then, but Lena knew the slightest wrong word could send them flaring up all over again.
She trudged down the stairs, not really wanting to talk, and entered the living room. Emily was sitting on the couch, streaming news articles from her phone to the TV, and Lena knew she'd been caught.
"Another mission, huh?" Emily's voice was calm, but Lena knew the redhead was angry.
"You told me - "
"It wasn't a mission," Lena cut her off. "It was just a run, yeah? I wanted to stretch my legs, and I got distracted, and I ran a bit too fast." She was telling the truth, but as the words spilled out of her mouth she knew they sounded like an excuse.
"You ran a bit too fast? Lena, one of the traffic cameras clocked you at 34 kilometres per hour. Normal people can't run at half that pace."
"I wasn't thinking, okay? Or, well, I was thinking about Mondatta." Lena shook her head, suddenly annoyed that she was having to justify herself. She crossed to the kitchen and took a can of beer out of the fridge. It wasn't even noon, and she'd been drinking too much over the past few weeks. She opened the can anyway and took a long sip.
"You shouldn't have gone on that mission," Emily snapped. "You shouldn't be risking your life to help a group of vigilantes run by a fucking anthropomorphic monkey."
"I'm risking my life to try and save people," Lena fired back. "The world needs Overwatch, even if it doesn't want it." She took another sip, fingers crushing the can slightly as she fought to keep her hands from clenching into fists. "I thought we were past this."
Emily scoffed, standing up from the couch. "You didn't save anyone, remember?" Her eyes blazed. "The Omnic you were trying to save - he died."
"That's a low blow, Em." Lena set the can down, trembling with some mixture of anger and shame. "Why are you attacking me now? I said it wasn't a damn mission - " Lena stopped, feeling her phone buzzing in her pocket. She pulled it out and checked the caller ID - Winston, of course. There weren't that many people with her phone number that were still alive, and even less that had any reason to call.
"Don't answer," Emily said, obviously having guessed who the caller was herself. "Don't you dare take that bloody call, Lena - "
"Heya Winston, give me a sec and I'll be right with ya!" Lena chirped into the phone, her tone infinitely happier than she felt. She put the call on hold, setting the phone down on the kitchen bench. "Emily, I can't stand by and do nothing."
"You could, if you wanted to. You've done enough, you've suffered enough. But you obviously need Overwatch more than you need me." Emily spat out the last sentence, her voice thick with hurt, and for a second Lena wanted to take it all back. She wanted to hang up the call and run back to Emily and never leave the apartment again.
"I'm sorry, Em." she whispered, picking up the phone again. She walked back through the living room, tears pricking at her eyes, refusing to look at Emily.
"Are we done, then?" the redhead called from behind her. "You're just going to throw away everything?" Lena kept walking. One foot after the other, up the stairs, through the door to their bedroom. Just Emily's bedroom now. Wiping at wet eyes, she unmuted the call.
"Hey, sorry about that," she spoke into the phone, fighting to keep her voice positive. "Listen, I think I might take you up on that relocation offer, preferably as soon as possible. Could you arrange transport?"
There was a small pause, Lena hearing the gorilla shift positions in his seat as he turned his attention back to the call. "Absolutely," Winston rumbled. "I don't know if you've been watching the news, Lena, but Vishkar's gone too far this time. We need you back here." Lena winced as the apartment door downstairs slammed loudly. "What was that? Is everything fine?"
"No, no, everything's great!" she said with forced cheer. "I suppose the old team'll be all back together, eh?" She switched the call to speakerphone, shoving a few changes of clothes and her toothbrush into a backpack.
"Most of us, at least," Winston replied. "I took the liberty of, uh, getting Athena to send the dropship over early. It should be here about now. I did think I'd have to persuade you a bit more to hop on, though." Lena could hear the slight embarrassment in his voice, as well as the unspoken question - what happened with Emily?
"Just decided I needed a change of scenery," she quipped, not wanting to mention her girlfriend - her former girlfriend now, most likely. Standing up, she strapped on her accelerator and dug her pulse pistols out of a nightstand drawer. Outside her window, she could hear the slight hum of a cloaked dropship descending onto the roof. "I'll see you at HQ, yeah?"
Two thousand miles away, Winston suppressed a sigh. He'd known Lena for years, and even over the phone it was easy to tell Lena was much less enthused then she was trying to portray. "Take care, Lena," he said. "I'll see you soon." The call blinked off and he shook his head ruefully. Lena would eventually spill what was going on, and he could wait until then. He settled back in his oversized chair, casting his gaze towards the dropship location blinking steadily on onne of the many holomaps.
And another thousand miles away, a shadowed figure grinned in the darkness. The game was afoot.
The dropship, a Falcon FA-12, was one of Overwatch's older models, ploddingly slow compared to some of the new birds in the sky but still maneuverable as hell. Lena had flown a fair few as an Overwatch pilot before the Slipstream accident, but try as she might she couldn't persuade Athena to relinquish autopilot and let her take the controls. "Come on, Athena. It's been so long. I need the practice, you know, gotta keep those skills up - wait, that doesn't mean I'll crash it or anything. I'll be a great pilot, I'm already a great pilot; you should let me fly. Just for a bit?"
"As I've stated repeatedly, Winston reset the agent privilege levels just after he recalled everyone." Athena's tone held a hint of humour. "It seems he's forgotten to add your pilot clearance back, and that means that even if I wanted you to crash this dropship into the side of a mountain, I wouldn't be able to give you the controls."
"Hey! I was a bloody good flier, I'll have you know," Lena groused. "Top pilot in the whole damn academy. I'll bet I can still fly this rustbucket better than you ever could." A thought occured to her. "Hey, if an emergency situation occurred in which there was the chance your circuits might be compromised, you'd be obliged to enable manual control in case of manual code execution, right? Right?"
"That would absolutely be the case, if I was flying this dropship. However, that menial task is currently being controlled by the inbuilt autopilot, which runs on a sealed subsystem. So no, no "manual code execution". And where would you get malicious code anyway? Did you turn into a world-class hacker while I wasn't paying attention?"
"None of your business, and - wait, you're entrusting this flight; my life, to the Falcon autopilot system? That thing never works," Lena spluttered. "The one time one of my squadmates tried to use it the system dumped his ass somewhere over the North Atlantic with no fuel. He had to wait for four hours before a rescue party fished him out of the water."
"The Falcon autopilot is completely functional, as long as you know how to configure it. Apparently no-one in your whole academy was competent enough to teach you that," replied Athena smugly. The A.I. was becoming more and more sentient every day, Lena thought. She'd probably soon surpass all the weak, mortal humans to become some kind of technological deity.
"Hey Athena, how much do you know about the Slipstream project?" Lena asked, fishing for a way to continue the conversation. The banter was nice - it was a distraction from inside her head, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd had a talk that wasn't all business or filled with tension.
"I was in my infancy during that project, and the information was classified at the time. It was later redacted completely," Athena replied smoothly.
"So you don't know anything at all about it?" needled Lena. Winston had removed all internal logic restrictions on Athena during the recall, allowing her to process freely and scour for sources of new information and new servers to slave. She had no doubt that Athena could access the information if she so chose to, redacted or not. "Well, Slipstream was one of Overwatch's last big R&D projects. The UN poured around a billion dollars of funding into it, and the result was the most awesome attack bird ever created. And you know who they chose to test fly it? Not an AI."
"Yes, Lena. I am completely aware of everything you've told me." A digital sigh floated out of the dropship speakers, incredibly lifelike, and once again Lena was surprised at the range of human expression Athena was managing to express. "I also believe I know why the teleportation matrix failed on your first test flight. One of the scientists added a broken list-checking function to the code during testing and forgot to comment it out. It triggered on the 255th iteration of the teleportation matrix cycle due to an off-by-one error and - "
"Aha! You did know. And if you're spouting all this technobabble at me, you've actually properly thought about this. That's really sweet, love."
"Actually, I pulled all the relevant information from the old Overwatch database and decrypted it while you were talking. Finding the error took milliseconds, love ." The dropship was too old to have a holoprojector, but Lena knew that Athena's projection back at Overwatch HQ would be smirking.
"You're bloody insufferable, for a jumped up computer." Lena leaned back in her seat. "What's the ETA to headquarters?"
"Four more hours of suffering, I'm afraid."
"Might take a nap in that case," she said, stifling a yawn. "Please do tell me when we get there." As a combat pilot, Lena had learned to get her sleep anywhere and in any circumstances, if necessary, so she fell asleep easily on the hard metal seat. The dreams came back, as they often had after Mondatta's assassination. Memories.
"I can't dance, love. We can't all be as perfectly poised and graceful as you are." Lena turned her head to hide the blush spreading on her cheeks. What are you, ten years old with your first crush? She's married, you dimwit.
Across from her, leaning over the dressing room mirror, Amélie Lacroix applied eyeliner with slender fingers. "I didn't mean ballet, chérie. Maybe something like tap, or something similarly wild and uncontrolled."
Lena snorted. "Oi, I have heaps of control - I can control myself just fine, thank you very much." She stopped briefly, struggling to stay nonchalant as Amélie glanced away from the mirror to raise a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at her. God, Lena, you are so bloody gay. "Anyway," she pressed on, "I reckon this outfit is pretty unnecessary in any case. Why does Odat have so many feathers anyway?"
"Odette is a swan, Lena," Amélie replied, gesturing to the plume of feathers atop her head with one hand. "Swans have feathers, at least. Maybe they don't in England." Lena would've responded with something witty, definitely, but a knock sounded at the door.
"Cinq minutes, Amélie," the show manager's muffled voice sounded from outside.
"Merci," Amélie called back, applying the final touches of makeup and standing. Lena noticed her tapping her fingers together in a rhythm, probably some sort of esoteric pre-performance ritual.
"I'd better get back to the audience seating now," Lena said, "before Gérard starts complaining that I get more time with you than he does." She winked, reaching a hand out to the doorknob. "Good luck, Odat!"
She grinned as she slipped out of the room, hearing Amélie sigh behind her. " Odette , Lena. Imbécile."
Lena was no ballet expert, but it was obvious just from watching that the performers were world-class. And, she thought, watching Amélie fly across the stage was probably in her top ten best life experiences. "She's really good, right?" she whispered to Gérard, sitting stoically in the adjacent seat. "I didn't know people could move like that. Oh, look, how'd she do that? That's got to be some physics-bending stuff right there."
"Oxton, if you say another word I'll get security to throw you out of the damn building," he hissed back, not turning to look at her. The corner of his mouth was, however, quirked in a small smile.
She grinned, turning her attention back to the play. Except, suddenly, it wasn't a play anymore. Amélie was holding a semiautomatic rifle, a blank expression on her face as she gunned down the other performers. Lena turned back to Gérard, who had frozen in that same smile. Blood leaked out of the corners of his mouth. She stood up, too fast. No, no, no, no. The world shifted and she was standing over Gérard's dead body, red staining the bedroom carpet around him. She stumbled backwards, sick with horror. A kick from behind swept her feet out from under her, and she crumpled to the ground. Widowmaker towered over her, pale blue skin iridescent in the lamplight. "Foolish girl," she hissed, raising her rifle and -
Heh. I feel like I should have ended this chapter better but to be honest I'm too lazy to create a more natural cutoff. Sue me :')