A/N: Hey everyone! It's my very first time writing for Overwatch (this also marks my first time posting here after my three-year-long hiatus). Concrit is very much appreciated, aaaand, yeah, enjoy this oneshot.
Lúcio and Symmetra get swept under the rug a lot and it's a damn shame.
Some believed that each team could be seen as a family. The caretaker; the healer was the Team Mom, and Mercy did not accept that honor as much as she embraced it and never let go. Her professional demeanor would slip every so often, and she would find herself jokingly asking her patients if she could "kiss it better" (the phrasing of which left Torbjörn scarlet in the face).
The title of Team Dad went over to Jack Morrison, though the election results were not unanimous on that account. Tracer, for one, insisted he was too old of a fart to be considered a parent. A grandparent, most certainly, but not a father. Despite Tracer's honesty, the unofficial title befell him. He did what he could with it; mostly complaining all the while.
After the parents were set into place, the rest of the team soon picked up their own ranks within the family; the siblings, the uncles, the wine aunt, the gay cousin, the really gay cousin; most obscure bloodlines and connections imaginable, more pronounced among some and representing an initial association with others. Overwatch was always a family.
Lúcio was always the bro.
Not the formal and uppity "brother", but simply a "bro", the kind one could rely on and share secrets with. The kind of person who obsessed about hobbies, who engaged in playful banter at every chance. He was the type who knew when to get serious and when to play a tune; when to scratch the record and when to shut everything down. Relationships between members could be tense at best and downright hostile at worst, but Lúcio always managed to get on the good side. Whether by his haste on the battlefield, his good taste in beats or the way he expressed pure, unbridled passion beneath the gossamer of casual idleness. He achieved the status of the man everybody could like. The glue which kept the family together in little remarkable ways.
If Lúcio was not keen on somebody, it was clear whose fault it was.
Symmetra and he had a history. That much was certain. When greeting others in battle, Lúcio was a barrel of laughs, praises, phrases of encouragement. Once Symmetra ran by, he would roll past her. Two ships at the sea, passing parallel.
It was a small detail, but on Lúcio every silence screamed. It was not long until they began to see Symmetra in a different light. She was a good strategist and a brilliant architect, but outside of battle she kept mostly to herself. Her projects occupied her mind, becoming who she was, where she lived, everything she loved and knew. It was difficult to approach her when she worked in complete focus. She hated chaos which came from interruption. She ignored suggestions, knowing she could always do best. Her work was perfection, symmetry and golden form, uninimitable. Aware of this, her team left her to her own devices during their downtime.
Her devices kept her secluded, comforted even, but her status fell in the family's inside joke. She could not be seen as a caretaker, a friend, a belligerent outsider. Sometimes, as cruel as it sounded, she was simply present as the air and sky. Beautiful. Geometrically perfect. Ignored unless pointed at.
In all fairness, she had a role in the family; a role filled by the runts of the litter and lonesome outcasts. The black sheep. The unspoken moniker made no difference to her.
No difference at all, until she was lonely.
Light-bending was an ability given to Gods, her mother used to say. Then again, her mother also said she liked the slums they lived at, so she took her words with a grain of salt. The Gods created the world through a dance and song, moving figures, clapping hands and twisting hips until it was there. They called her, urged her to try the dance of creation, but she refused each time. Fellow light-benders danced to chaotic music. Their footwork was flawed, too fast. Her methodical approach yielded results which brought her to the top of her class, to the top of her career. There was nothing to want at that point. She had mastered the precision required, and used it to the best of her honed abilities.
It was the dead of the night, and she flicked her wrist at a pillar by her wall. The inner curve tilted at an angle which was off by three fifths of a degree, and this made it impossible to sleep. She created the construction cyan blue, magnificent in its right. It spun around her ascetic quarters like marble, the spires ballooning over the ceiling. She disliked it; and the dislike grew each day. There were days when she considered flattening the construction into four identical obelisks, one on each corner of her abode. Yet this would not suffice. Months ago, she promised herself that she would bend reality to create an architectural feat in a constricted space. It demanded time, effort and precision. Satya had all three in spades.
The light stopped moving at her command. Her head was throbbing. Hands shook as she faced unfinished work. A strand of deep brown hair curled into her palm and she twisted it twice before smoothening her powder blue pajama top. She had worked on the construction since the evening. A clouded, tired mind never gave clear results. It was enough, she told herself, despite every fiber of her being screaming at her to continue. This is enough.
It was after she sat on her bed – a hard light queen-sized oval draped with silk baldachin – that she recalled how long she was trapped inside.
Her mind was in a state of perpetual focus since her faction's final mission. How long has it been? Ten days? Twenty days? She had been in her own space with her own thoughts, creating her own vision of perfection for weeks. She had stopped to eat, sleep, and shower. Twiddling her thumbs, she recalled the noise and raucous laughter which she canceled out. It was days ago… or perhaps hours ago…
It was then that a heavy sigh escaped her nostrils, and she slouched with her head in her hands.
Nobody. Not a soul. Nobody had greeted her.
It was good that they did not. She needed her focus and socialization was a friendly distraction, nothing more. She disliked the small talk, the talk of weather she never cared for, the talk of themselves, plans for the weekend, preparations for the mission she had already went through. Nobody ever asked her about designs – nobody sans Winston, once. She spoke for three hours and he refrained from asking since.
She smiled at the memory, having no idea why.
And so, after weeks in near-perfect isolation, she found herself lonely.
Then she heard the music.
Her beautiful brown eyes moved up to the ceiling, then the wall. Her heart quickened and softened, beating in accordance with the steady beat, broken apart with the vibrato of strings. She moved; one bare leg in front of the other, and she walked – no, she floated from her room. The mechanical door whooshed open, and she stepped out in the darkness. Her head moved to and fro, mouth lightly parted. The Gods were calling her. Shapes manifested in harmony, calling to her, promising order. Strings met piano and a woman's soft humming.
Neon lights filled her vision, and smooth lights painted her skin into hues of green and purple. Her throat constricted and she swallowed a heavy note. As though hypnotized, she pressed a hand to the fingerprint-detecting lock. Within a second her arm produced a cyan hand around hers, in Lúcio's perfect likeness. The mechanical door whirred, pushed to the side, and she came into the alcove of transcendence.
If one were to get past the smell, the room was an incredible feat of technology. Old apparatuses, stolen from her corporation, painted with neon, holographic graffiti. The art covered the walls and ceiling, and for a brief instant she was back in the favela, among the loud children, the little girl with a beautiful face…
She couldn't think of it. Not there. Not as music made her chest swollen, filled with harmonizing scales, instruments which placed chaos into shackles and commanded it to be harmonious.
Lúcio sat in front of the wide screen, his bare feet on the dashboard where he mixed his tunes. His hands were tangled in his dreads; the grin on his face seemed to fall into the tattoo on his shoulder, which spiraled across taut skin, from the neck to the bicep. Colors splashed his body; colors from the screen, which pulsated and changed in accordance to the music that played. Satya had never seen such harmony of color and music. The man seemed completely at ease, one with the universe, experiencing nirvana as techno blasted his ears.
After a second he looked at the door to see his teammate; her hand over the slit where his door opened and closed; covered with a silk pajama down to half of her thighs. Entranced, enraptured with music; eyes glowing as a cascade of hair rolled down her back and shoulders.
It was then and there that he realized that he was dressed in boxers and very little else. He squealed, scrambling to cover himself. A shirt thrown over his chair served as something to pull over his head, and as he haphazardly dressed, he turned off the music. The neon concerto stopped, leaving dead air, a blank screen, and the reappearance of natural lights. Symmetra swallowed hard. The magic was lost.
"Symmetra!" He tried his hardest to sound enthusiastic, and it worked to a degree. Swiveling in his chair, he managed to dress without knocking over any equipment. "It's good to, uh…" See you? Meet you? See you? "H-hey. There."
"Hello," Symmetra said, standing akimbo with her head slightly lowered.
The corner of Lúcio's mouth curved upwards as he tied to crack a smile. Behind the exterior of an admittedly beautiful woman, he could only see a worker for Vishkar – no matter how long it has been since she worked for them, no matter how little contact she had still. Once a suit, always a suit, Junkrat once said to him. He applied this logic to affiliation and references, too, and Lúcio had trouble disagreeing.
He watched Symmetra as she watched him. This went on for a while.
"Can I…" He coughed and kicked back in his seat. "Did you need something?"
"Yes."
He nodded, awaiting an addition to her statement. He waited. And waited. And waited for a minute which felt like an eternity.
"Care to –?"
"Did you want me t–?" She stopped briefly and continued. "Did you want me to say what I needed? I sometimes fail to catch implied questions."
"Nah, it's fine," he said, the weight of broken ice falling off of him. "Whadja need?"
"Your music," she said, reminding herself that she needed to add to her answer. "I heard it from my room."
His expression darkened. "Oh. I can… I can turn it down if you want."
"No."
He tilted his head. "No?"
"I came here because I heard it, and it was…"
A myriad of expressions flooded her head. Exceptional, divine, ethereal, awe-inspiring, superb, sublime, something to behold… In the end, as she twisted her wrist in musing, her mind battled for choosing the words "awe-inspiring" and "winsome", but as the final choice exited her mouth, the compliment became something else entirely.
"… awesome."
She jolted as she said it. Well. It was a word, in any case. Certainly not the one she would use – too colloquial.
With a slight forty-degree turn of the head, she saw he was as perplexed at her word as she was. His mouth askew, his eyes wide, she could tell he tried to reply. Perhaps the comment was too trite for his creation; perhaps he expected more. He laughed – a singular, proud "ha!" in her direction, before he leaned back on his seat with his hands behind his head.
"You liked it?"
"Your harmonizing is incredible. The use of synth in contrast with the strings is a combination that rarely feels pleasing to the ears." She paced as she spoke, cupping her hands. "It felt like dancing even when I wasn't – like building blocks coming together."
The association was not far-fetched. The swelling in her chest, the lightness in her head and the absolute ease that flushed over her in a wave strongly reminded her of the feeling she had whenever a building was complete. Pure, unbridled sense of accomplishment; turned to awe by somebody else's merit. Inspiration flooded her, boiled inside her. A part of her wished to return to her chambers and finish her construction of light. Most of all, however, she wanted to hear the end of the song.
It took her a few tries to find his bed. The first time she sat on a beanbag chair. Lúcio helped her out of it, pushing and pulling until she stumbled onto a mess of clothing on his covers. Gods, she thought, he would need to clean up from time to time. At the very least, he should invest in air freshener. Her stomach churned at the thought of how long it was since the man had properly cleaned. Closing her eyes, she demanded that he play the song again.
It was a brusque, sudden demand. She feared that the state of the room would make her change her mind.
He obliged and played again. The lights grew dim, and then painted his walls with colors of the universe.
Her eyes glimmered at the screen, dancing with sound. She finally understood why light-bending was a craft created out of dance. When she tried it, she heard nothing. The scores were kitschy, the hollers were vulgar, and nothing completed her. But this! Astounding. Upon hearing the notes, she felt whole, ready to build a utopia down to the very last stone. The world would be greater if all could hear this. Her constructions and Lúcio's music. Her manipulation of reality. His manipulation of time and emotion. A wayward tear created a streak of salt on her face and she wiped it away with her palm. He noticed and smiled; a softer smile than most she received.
It came from his mind, she thought. His creation was given to him by a divine entity, or he found his skill on his own. Every transition, every chord, every healing, soothing vocal was found by him, crafted by him, created into something moving… misplacing a progression, nay, a note and it would crumble. Perfection down to the skin of its teeth. A rapture of sound. Her body shook from within, as she realized then that she was in the presence of real power. "Awesome," she said again, and this time the word felt lighter on her tongue.
It ended. He turned to see her, and did not even need to ask whether she enjoyed it. "I want to listen to that every day," she said. After that, even his messy room seemed to fall in place. Order in chaos.
Peace in company.
He chuckled to himself. "Aw, it's nothing. Wait 'til you hear this one." He turned to the dashboard, one finger pressing down on a glinting red button. He pressed his headphones over his ears and announced: "This one's from my new album!"
The following three minutes were much more painful. She told him as much.
/***/
Ships in a storm. Passing parallel.
"Hello," Symmetra greeted, and Lúcio found himself silent at first, not believing it was she who greeted him.
"Hey," he said, pocketing a hand. "You were, uh… good today. Good fight."
"Awesome fight."
She said that word more and more each day. The rest of Overwatch took note.
Interactions between them were still few and far in between, but at least they were present. More and more often, Satya talked to Lúcio about his music. He came to discuss architecture once, which eventually ended up as a heated argument about colonialism. They fought, they joked, and they conversed the best they could. Little by little, she began spending time away from her chamber. Day by day, she mastered the art of small-talk. It was only when Lúcio gifted her a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that their relationship solidified into something stronger; richer in terms of understanding. There were no more outcasts in Overwatch.
The black sheep was painted neon; a beloved part of the family.