Just Another Day
The battle was over, bodies and limbs strewn across the cobbles with shining bullets scattered amongst them like discarded confetti after a celebration.
Her muscles ached as she forced her legs to move, stepping over dropped guns and ashen faces, walking down the street she had once known but now could barely recognize. The rest of her team were gathering themselves, calling in their victory on the radio, checking who had survived and who…hadn't.
"Oxton!" a voice called, someone waving at her to hurry up.
She raised one of her pistols in a half-hearted salute and tried to pick up the pace. "I'm coming!"
Her arm fell back to her side like heavy lead. She was so exhausted, her entire body willing for her to collapse to the ground and just drown in the bloodbath that surrounded her. She could see her team climbing into their armoured truck, the engine roaring to life, the noise reverberating down the street like an angered beast.
How many had she killed? How many had tried to kill her? Omnics? Humans? She had long lost count, but she felt every single one as a weight on her shoulders. She tried to keep her smile, she forced it onto her lips, and she never told anyone about the nightmares. Only Emily knew, only Emily could ever know how it tore in to her. The fear that suffocated her every fight, the way her hands would tremble when she picked up her guns, when she would see the same fear in someone else's eyes.
Her foot slipped underneath her and she slammed into a wall to save herself. She closed her eyes, taking deep haggard breaths. "You can do this, Lena," she told herself. "It's just another day."
The empty gazes and glimmering blood at her feet told her otherwise. Today the omnics had lost their battle, but they'd taken a number of innocent people down with them and she tasted every death as cold iron on her tongue.
"Just another day."
But the fights and deaths weren't the only things that haunted her nights. She had flickered out of existence once, who knew when she would lose her grip on this world – this time - again? But what made it only worse? The feeling, the dreadful sensation, that someone was always watching her.
She opened her eyes and looked around herself. It was quiet. So very quiet. But she still felt it. A stare that bore straight through her, cutting into her very flesh and seeing everything. Was it just her imagination? Was it the enemy? Was it someone hiding from the destruction? Was it death itself, waiting for her to let her guard down?
"Oxton!" the voice called again.
Just another day, she thought, picking herself up and joining her team.
"Hey, Lena," a voice whispered, gentle, caring.
"Tracer," a voice growled, aggressive, threatening.
"Oxton," a voice shouted, commanding, imitating.
Then the voices she had never heard, the ones she had caught in a different time, a different world, until she was harnessed back into present reality. They knew her or knew of her, and she never knew them.
Nightmares, flashes of battles and blood, and the terror of flickering in and out of time. Where was she now? When was she now? Who had she killed today? Who would try and kill her tomorrow?
Just another day…
But today wasn't.
Something was wrong with the chronal accelerator.
She took cover in an alleyway, breathing heavily, watching as the machine blinked all different colours, as if struggling whether to let her take back control or not.
And then it stopped. The colours stopped. The noise stopped. The fight outside the alleyway stopped. Bullets were trapped in a vortex, faces were frozen, blood and oil danced unmoving in the air.
Time had stopped.
She hadn't willed this. She looked back at the chronal accelerator. It seemed normal, she felt she once again had control. But something was still very, very wrong.
If this wasn't her doing…who had stopped time?
The eyes knew the answer. The stare she had always felt ever since Winston had brought her back, the watchful gaze who knew her every move and thought. It was here, in the shadows of the alleyway, and it approached her.
"No," she breathed, dread filling her and turning her blood cold. "No, it can't be."
"Lena Oxton," her own voice said.
"No," she repeated.
But it was. She was standing in front of herself. The stare was her own. The voice was her own. Lena 'Tracer' Oxton, except her eyes were as empty as those who had fallen, dark shadows and old scars telling the story of battles she had never seen, of horrors she had never witnessed. Her clothes were stained, ragged, bloodied, ripped and torn, hanging off her body as if they were two sizes too big.
Fear. Hatred. Sorrow. Anguish. Desolation. It rang off her in waves, slamming into her chest, making her feel every single loss like they were her own.
"What do you want?" she asked her other self.
"To correct a mistake."
And the Lena Oxton who had frozen time, the one who had seen too much, who had travelled across blood-drenched and darkened timelines to this very moment, raised a gun very much like one of her own.
"A mistake?" she asked shakily, meeting death's gaze.
Her other self didn't speak. Instead, she pulled the trigger.
Lena didn't feel pain. Instead, she felt utter terror that rippled through her body like a snake choking and chilling every inch of her.
The alleyway blanched like an old reel running out of film, the edges of her vision greying and curling like a burning photograph. Her other self jumped in and out of sight, as if her time was finally done here. The gun fell to her side like heavy lead. "A mistake," she said, and then she was gone.
Lena didn't feel pain. She didn't feel anything but the terrible sensation of her soul and body and limbs being pulled in different directions, as if her feet weren't truly touching the ground, as if the alleyway was something she was looking at through thick glass, as if her own heart was beating in someone else's chest.
She knew this feeling.
She looked down. The chronal accelerator was broken, falling off her shoulders like a shattered omnic under fire and blinking at her like a dying, winking eye. Winston wasn't here to fix it. Her team were too far away to help her. No one even knew she was here, and she was already losing her grip. Soon, she wouldn't be here at all.
A mistake.
Lena didn't feel pain.
Just another day.
She felt only loneliness and fear in a place between time.