Heels click soundlessly against the sun-baked rooftop in slow, calculated strides. Scorching heat makes the air quiver as little as 20 meters away, showing up as undulations of red through her many-eyed visor. Widowmaker gives her surroundings a sweep with her eyes watching, assessing, analyzing. She nods to herself in reassurance. The sniper's cradle she's chosen is the optimal spot to eliminate targets from.
Perhaps only a mile or so out looms the Temple of Anubis; she almost wishes it were later in the day so that its shadow would stretch impossibly long over the arid landscape and shade her from the sweltering heat. Unauthorized, Widowmaker's brain takes the sight of the large pyramid connects it with an image of the late Ana Amari, projected across her mind's eye. That's right, she recalls; this was her homeland, in life. (In death: an abandoned building in another country, courtesy of the Talon agent herself.) Her nose crinkles in a vague expression of disgust. She does not understand how anyone could defend such a miserably barren place with the fervor her ex-rival sniper had. Then again, there was very little she understood about any action dictated by any emotion at all - Enough, she chides herself. Dwelling on such random thoughts will not complete the task at hand.
Her sights easily pluck the dark forms of her quarries out from against the sandstone buildings near their ally's compound below, crosshairs aligning with the first despite the glare of the Egyptian sun in her scope. A little sun in her eyes is nothing to her; she barely even squints in response to it. Lifting the Widow's Kiss to her shoulder, she pulls dry air into her lungs with pursed lips - un, deux, trois - and exhales in the same fashion - quatre, cinq, six - until her lungs are devoid of oxygen. She holds her breath.
Bang.
The shot punctures the head of the first innocent's head with a satisfying thunk. He drops like a puppet cut from its strings. The person walking past him jumps with startled yelp - right into her cross-hairs. Her finger instinctively pulls the trigger, and the other man falls beside his companion, lifeless on the empty street leading towards Hakim's compound.
A thing of beauty. The sniper cannot stop the grin from spreading on her cold lips as she gazes at the sand canvas she has painted death upon.
The silver shine of a bullet mixed with the dull sanguine from the body was a sight that most would freeze in dread at. But not her. No, the mixing of those two colors never makes her feel more alive. As much as she loathes the way the sweat pools on at her hairline and makes her skin stick to her suit, baking beneath Egypt's sweltering sun is worth it for that brief high. Anything is.
Widowmaker's vision shifts from bright red to normal as her visor pulls away from her empty hazel eyes. She lowers her gun from her shoulder, the small high she gets from each kill fading rapidly, as the black-clad and owl masked man beside her scoffs at her masterpiece.
"Where were those shots in Numbani?"
Her expression hints at amusement. "I could ask the same of you, Faucheuse. How can a man kill twelve civilians and lay them out like a bread crumbs for the crows, yet still manage to be bested by an ape and a roadrunner?"
The growl elicited from Reaper - a laughable attempt at intimidating her - does nothing to erode her self-satisfied smile.
"I believe the 'roadrunner' bested you, Lacroix, not me," the former Blackwatch leader sneers, rising to his feet. How cute of him, still trying to rile her up, as if it were even possible. Her countenance does not change, to his evident chagrin. Spouting her legal surname seems to have no effect.
A pair of ocean blue eyes flashes across her mind. Her vision zooms out. A handsome man with a toothy grin laughs, eyes crinkling at the corners as he does so. In his large hands are a pair of fairer ones - her own. The tune of an upbeat, French pop song plays in her ears as her vision spins. He's twirling her, she recalls, they are dancing…
There's a ringing in her head, and her mind goes blank again, ghostly images gone.
'Seems,' of course, is the key word here.
"At least she only bested me once. Il est la deuxième fois avec le grand singe, n'est-ce pas?" she chimes as goes from crouch to stand, resting the top of her rifle's barrel on her shoulder as she searches for another position to back-up Reaper from.
The man tilts his head away from her, cracking his neck with a loud pop as he walks towards the ledge. "For Talon's finest, you do a lot more talking than shooting, puta. Guess some things don't change."
(While she was never as much of a chatterbox as Lena or Reinhardt was, she was known for her ability to just keep talking as she saw fit, way back when.)
"Then let us do what we came to do. I believe it was you who started this conversation, non?" Widowmaker's grappling hook shoots out from atop her wrist and grabs the overhang above the compound's large entrance, and she allows her body to be pulled from the rooftop without waiting for Reaper's response. Regardless of who began it, she's ending it. They have more important things to do than bicker like children. By the low hiss that rapidly fades as she creates distance between herself and her accomplice, Reaper seems to begrudgingly agree.
Their mission is simple: lure, and wait. Hakim, a valuable friend to Talon, has already laid out some bait for the pesk who has been throwing a wrench in Talon's operations in Egypt thus far. Posters of a masked person with a high bounty were pasted on every bit of limestone and granite wall in Cairo, flapping in the hot, desert wind. If their intel is correct about certain mercenaries and their identities, both the bounty hunter and the mystery man that has been popping up on the news - the man people are calling the Soldier, or 76 - will make an appearance.
How can they not, if they truly are the former Overwatch agents Talon expects them to be?
They may have been careless in Numbani in handling Tracer and Winston, but no longer. Widow is more alert than ever with the Overwatch recall now in the public eye. She's prepared to catch glimpses of phantoms from the past at any given moment, sightings of resurrected ghosts that need to be sent back to the grave. And she will not hesitate like she did at the museum because of those children - no, it wasn't because of them, she tells herself. She tells herself that they were not a threat to the objective, until the older child took the Doomfist gauntlet. There was no need to shoot until they were in the way. And yet, even then, she hesitated… She shakes her head to herself in dismissal. This train of thought is like those children: irrelevant to the mission at hand.
Widowmaker gets into position above the plain double doors, thankful that the overhang she is perched upon provides shade from the intense sun. With their web weaved in full and her venom mine set to alert them of their incoming targets, all they can do now is wait for their prey to get stuck in it.
Reaper, being the impatient assassin he is, paces about the compound with an irritated air; Hakim's employees give him a wide berth. As they should, she thinks. Boredom makes the man bloodthirsty, and as she has seen several times before, he will gladly give in to the urge to kill without reason.
For her, however, boredom presents a very different problem. She has patience - she must, when she waits for her flies to be ensnared in her web - but her mind strays when there is nothing for it to focus intently on. And if today has shown her anything, it's that her mind is dangerously scattered today.
It's like an itch that she can't scratch, and the longer it lingers, the more intense it gets. Like someone dragging nails against a chalkboard, a fork screeching across a plate... Like someone slamming their hands against piano keys, a sound so out of tune within her skull that there's a twitch in her hands, an urge to cover her ears.
Widowmaker clenches her jaw, molars grinding against one another in discomfort. Enough. She cannot compromise another objective.
She puts her visor on, actively looking for something to help her restore order - messages about upcoming missions, news reports regarding targets of interest… Anything to make this unpleasant feeling cease. A digital 1 has appeared next to the file marked "Special Operations" since checking this morning. Relieved to find something for her mind to latch onto, she toggles the button on the side of her visor to select and open the message, visually tuning out the sandy courtyard and the smudge of black that is Reaper that storms around it.
The file is short and to the point, much like all the other ones usually are. (The only times they are lengthy is when her mission requires extensive knowledge concerning a target or due to complicated instructions, for she is only given the information deemed absolutely necessary to completing a given task. That is Talon's way: clean cut.) Talon has received information about the location of Hanzo Shimada, former leader of the criminal Shimada Clan. She recalls him being of interest to Talon as a potential ally prior to leaving the Shimada Family, but she had assumed since he'd broken his ties with the organization that he was no longer of use. According to the file, the opposite turns out to be true.
Her mission is to hunt him down and persuade him into returning to the Shimada Family so that they might become allies with Talon. In exchange for support, Talon will be offering money and resources to help continue to make the family profitable, as well as ensuring Hanzo's brother Genji Shimada, a former Overwatch, is either spared or disposed of, depending on Hanzo's wishes.
If he refuses, she is to eliminate him. They cannot risk Genji Shimada attempting to recruit him for Overwatch.
She sifts through attachments concerning her mission - her plane ticket to Nepal, false passport and credentials, directions to the Shambali Monastery where he seems to be heading (funny, this will be her second time concerning the spiritual omnics), the layout of the Monastery and surrounding towns. She makes note of everything, thorough, precise.
An hour passes, and to her relief, the feeling has almost faded completely. She takes a vague sense solace in the neutral silence that has returned to her, and sigh falls from her lips. If only it weren't so damn hot-
A warning flash glares across the red of her visor: 'Mine Triggered.'
"Reaper," she says quietly through the com. Though the mine was set up far enough away from the compound to be able to shout down to him workout being detected, there is no way to tell if their is on foot or incoming via vehicle. She refuses to take any chances. "Targets incoming."
"Understood." He ceases pacing, fingers pressed against the com on his ear as he turns to her. His voice is a low growl. "They're mine. Keep your ass out of sight and don't shoot unless I tell you otherwise."
"Understood."
It was like this every time they teamed up on a mission concerning former Overwatch agents; he wanted to be the one to eliminate them, and no one else. And that was just fine by her. All that mattered in the end was that they completed the mission.
Getting onto the balls of her feet in a crouch, she creeps backward, hiding herself in the shadows as she lifts the Widow's Kiss to her shoulder. Five minutes passes - the amount of time she had calculated it would take getting from the mine to the compounds entrance. Heavy footfalls signal the arrival of a target, right on cue.
Reaper disappears from the courtyard.
Some scuffling follows; a figure in red, white, and blue vaults himself over the wall of the compound. Superhuman strength, she notes. A normal man wouldn't be able to scale that wall without aid. He lands in the courtyard with a thud, pulse rifle flashing blue as one of Hakim's thugs attempts to flee, gunning him down. A red visor covers his face from the eyes down, and he searches for something… His gaze starts to swing towards her, but is interrupted as a shimmer of black behind him strikes.
There's a thwack as Reaper fires one of his shotguns into the target's back. The man lets out a gruff sound of surprise, falling to ground with a thud, face first.
"Always rushing in, Jack…" Reaper clucks, looming over him. Images flash across Widowmaker's brain at the mention of that old, familiar name. She locks up as the man in her scope struggles to push himself up. "I've been looking for you since Switzerland. Knew it'd take more than that to you kill you…"
Suddenly she can neither hear Reaper, nor process what is happening down below her.
A vision of strike commander Jack Morrison appears before her, still in his prime. Seated around him are other familiar faces: Ana and her daughter, Fareeha; Jesse; Lena; Angela; Reinhardt; Mei; Winston; Mercy; Gabe; Torbjörn; Gérard.
A long, mahogany table lies before her, cluttered with quickly thinning China platters of meat: turkey, pheasant, quail, chicken, lobster and crab. A large bowl of endive and walnut salad sits half empty in the middle of the table. Lace doilies sit under each dish on the table, white and pristine. She passes a bowl of chestnut stuffing to Gérard on her right, who leans in to snag a peck on her cheek as he takes the bowl and serves himself a helping of it. Lena, who sits to her left, makes a face as she pokes the escargot on her plate with her fork. Widowmaker - no, Amélie - laughs at the sight, teasing Lena that she won't know she doesn't like it until she tries. Jack and Angela are the only ones at the table who give the escargot a shot. Angela seems to be surprised by the taste, and asks for more. Jack chews, swallows, and politely declines anymore with an odd expression on his face. Everyone laughs at the break in his usually stoic countenance, Lena proclaiming above the ruckus that if it's no good for the commander, it's no good for her. Fareeha pipes up saying that Lena would like it, since "British food is gross, too -"
A sharp growl of pain pulls Widowmaker back into the present. Her head throbs, ringing as if she were standing in a belfry with nothing to protect her ears. She grits her teeth, that Christmas dinner burned into her eyes, like a still image that has been left on an old TV or computer screen far too long. Reaper steps away from the man on the ground grabbing at the back of his neck; a purple streak flies past Reaper and hits Jack, and a familiar, yellow glow of warmth and being surrounding him.
"Get in there, Jack!"
Impossible… Her hazel eyes snap in the direction of a voice that should not be speaking, a voice that she silenced ten years ago.
A figure in beige is on the ledge above the outer gates directly across from Widowmaker, a sniper rifle in hand. A sliver of smooth, white hair is visible above her brow, a sharp contrast to her tan, weathered skin. An eyepatch obscures her right eye.
Widowmaker doesn't miss. Talon made sure of that with her training.
But apparently old soldiers like Ana Amari just won't roll over and die.