This week is gonna be kinda interesting since we're breaking this up a little different. This week we have a split chapter between Lena and Amélie!

Thank you all for all your comments, kudos, and hits this past week! I was really glad to have all those interactions with all of you! It was a highlight of posting tbh. I love exploring the meta of this fic so don't hesitate to strike up a conversation!

I hope everyone's taking some time to themselves if their semester has ended! For everyone else, I hope you're enjoying yourselves anyway!

Here's another plug for my co-author and boyfriend's World of Warcraft fic, a The Light Forsaken!/a He's hard at work on the next chapter, and he could always use a little encouragement.

This week's chapter, Go! is named for what might be my favorite song of the year by M83!


Lena Oxton took off through the night, breathing hard, sweat rolling down her back.

It'd been so long since she had to actively flee from people like this - a few Talon agents here and there, sure. Running from Widowmaker, sure. But she'd been spotted by the general public, and they were angry.

She hadn't been accustomed to that type of furiosity, remembering all that time ago when she was little more than a child at the coffee shop with Gérard. Remembering being idolized.

So many people resented Overwatch for what they'd done, what they'd become. People resented Overwatch for disappearing even though it was for the best. People resented Overwatch for ever existing, seeming to forget what would have happened if Overwatch hadn't been there to stop the bad guys.

Lena wanted to cry and scream for them to look around at their governments. At their radicals. At the violence so evident around every corner. She wanted to beg them to open their eyes to what Talon was doing.

She'd had to take off her chronal accelerator and squeeze it into her backpack. It was clunky and made everything a lot harder to get around, but she couldn't risk having things thrown at her again. She almost shot someone on accident for the balled up piece of paper they'd thrown at her. She'd almost killed for nothing.

The jewelry that Winston had made her as a replacement was tight on her skin. Cold. Without the steadying anchor of the larger accelerator, she felt… fuzzy. Or was that only in her mind? She knew they weren't as powerful, so she couldn't help but feel she was one step closer to Between? Either way, it would take some getting used to.

Lena's sprint calmed to a trot, then a breathless walk. She paused, leaning against the train station's partition between gates, trying to hide herself from prying eyes. She rested her hands on her knees, appreciating the cold tile against her lower back even through her spandex.

She'd thrown on a white tanktop and black shorts in an effort to be a little less conspicuous in the hot pink of it all. Now it just looked like she was just some rowdy kid with a radical undercut. She patted her chest frantically before feeling the rectangle of folded money still tucked on the underside of her breast, wedged between her flesh and her fabric. She didn't really have pockets that she trusted.

"'Scuse me, lass. I was wonderin' if you could help an old fella out."

Lena couldn't help but let a distressed squeal escape her as she tried to push herself further back into the partition, but her eyes fell upon a very small man, even compared to her height. She stared long and hard for a moment before laughing at the twinkle in the man's eye. His great, big, bushy beard bounced as he laughed.

"Lena, my dear, you look a little worse for wear," said Torbjörn Lindholm as he looked up at her.

"Oh, c'mon, now, love. This is an excellent disguise!" Her laughter had a sharp edge to it, to her own ear, but she didn't know if Torb noticed. Apparently, he did not.

Torbjörn sighed from his laugh, his eyes no longer twinkling like they had only moments before. "What're you doin' out here, Lena?"

The way he said it almost sounded like Leaner.

She sighed, standing a little straighter. "I could ask you the same."

The older man shuffled uncomfortably, flexing his prosthetic. "I'm here to help out ol' Winny and Ang. They've got something they want me to do with Athena-" Atheener. "That involves Hana's suit." He winked at Lena. "Maybe she'll finally let me look under the hood of that thing."

Lena felt herself grimacing. She hated the way he phrased that, but by the smile on his lips, she thought that maybe it was intentional. "She's been itching to get into the fight."

Törb smiled and nodded sagely. "I know it. That's why I'm getting up and ready to help her get back into it."

A stony silence broken only by ambient noise followed.

"Lena, why are you here?"

Lena remained quiet, and the calm voice of a train announcer called out a soon departing train. Torbjörn looked up with disgruntled eyes.

"I fucked up, Torb."

He sighed, hanging his head in quiet defeat. "I know, lass."

Panic washed over Lena in a surging wave. "What?"

He held up a placating hand. "I won't tell Angie, but I will tell her that you're safe, if that's alright. She deserves that much, don't you think?" He sighed again, more noticeably. "Be careful, kiddo." He looked up. "I gotta go."

He shuffled around a bit before ambling away.

It was a rather sudden departure and took Lena's line of thought down a different path. "Torbjörn?"

The small man turned, squinting in questioning.

"Can…" She bit her lip, heart beating fast. "Can you tell them that I'm sorry?"

The older man smiled sadly and shook his head slowly. "It won't do much good unless it's from you, but I'll do what I can."

With that, Lena watched him hobble away.

Something sunk in her heart, plopping into her stomach. It took root and began to spread.

The guilt.

Oh, the guilt almost overwhelmed her.


Lena stole away on a train several hours later, pushing by dozens of swarming individuals to board. She tried to keep to herself as much as possible and avoid the squints and disapproving glares from some. It was easier to be overlooked as some delinquent than noticed as a former Overwatch agent.

She felt herself smile sadly. Once an Overwatch agent, always an Overwatch agent.

Light flickered by outside, illuminating the cabin of the train in a glow that was oddly warm, considering the clinical fluorescence overhead in the cabin.

She didn't like being on subways anymore, fearing that the structures overhead would collapse on her.

Part of her wondered if all Overwatch agents felt panic prod them in enclosed spaces. Enclosed spaces meant a trap. It meant an inability to escape. It meant a potential for innocent lives lost in a desperate attempt to fight off encroaching enemies.

The cotton in her lungs began filling up the space too fast, stealing her deep breaths and replacing them with rasping gasps. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to forget the smell of brick dust and blood. Of gore. The thumping of the train, though quiet, sounded too much like the MRI machines she'd been put in after being stabilized after the In Between.

You're just stressed. This always happens when you're stressed. Breathe.

She tried to listen to herself, taking deep, measured breaths. She counted as best she could until her breaths matched. It must have taken longer than a few minutes. When she looked up, the last three stops had come and gone. She was closer to her destination than she thought, but that didn't bring her any kind of relief.

The roar of an airport would soon meet her, bringing back more memories that she was trying to escape. She winced, unsure how she would get through security. Or on the plane. Despair fell on her shoulders like some unseemly shawl of cobwebs as the gummy feeling in her chest returned. The pendant that hung around her neck felt like a giant arrow pointing at the space of her chest that no longer held a brilliant tombstone, pointing out her seemingly unnatural, exposed chest. The bracelets on her wrists chafed, shackles of her past that she couldn't escape.

She'd never be normal. She'd never be free.

A calm voice announced Lena's stop over the intercom in several languages as she packed up her things, waiting for the train to come to more of a stop. She wasn't used to riding trains anymore, despite practically living in one in her youth. That's how it was when she was a kid. That's how it was before Overwatch. That's how it all went before the accident.

She shuffled off, trying to leave the dark thoughts behind on the speeding train rather than take them with her. She didn't need that weight.

Her fingers danced along horizontal surfaces as she made her way through the train station's crowd, humming a tuneless thing to herself, distracting her from the eyes on her, but were they really even looking?

Probably not.

Still, that didn't erase the creeping feeling that someone was staring at that exposed, vulnerable place on her chest. Someone could kill her so easily now...

Her foot caught, making the breath huff out of her quickly and suddenly, and she looked around blearily, snatched from her encroaching dark thoughts. Her eyes met a small child's, looking up at her fearfully, tears in her eyes.

"Aw, Christ, kid. I'm sorry. Are you okay?" The recognition of her blasphemy caught up to her a few seconds later after her lapse in judgement. It had been a while since she'd been around an actual kid.

The girl didn't look over nine years old to Lena, and something about her reminded her of the time she'd gotten separated from her mother at an airport. Her wide, terrified eyes. Her recoil from anyone speaking to her.

"Kid…?"

"I…" She started in a quiet voice. "I think I'm lost…"

Lena frowned. "Where's your mum? She around?"

The girl shook her head once. "I'm going to meet my grandparents." She looked down at the bag in her hands, which looked a little oversized for such a small girl. "I- I got off the train at the wrong station, I think." Tears started welling up in her eyes. "I don't have enough money to buy a new ticket…"

Lena frowned slightly before smiling a little. "This your first trip by yourself?"

She nodded a little too hard and tottered.

Lena found herself giggling, the weight on her chest a little lighter. She wasn't in any particular hurry to get to the first Talon base on her list. She wasn't exactly ready to start killing people again.

How had she done it only months before?

"Listen, what's your name, love?" Her voice came out quiet and, even to her own ears, gentle and amiable.

"Marie."

Lena blinked, thinking of Amélie's middle name, and smiled again. "Alright, Marie. Do you have a phone to call your grandparents?"

The little girl sniffed incredulously, reminding Lena so much of Hana that it was hard to stifle a laugh. "Of course I do."

Lena nodded, still smiling. "Give 'em a call and say you're waiting on the next train. They shouldn't charge you for getting off too soon."

Marie nodded and did as she was told, her somber eyes scanning the surging and ebbing throngs of people flowing into and out of the subway. She nodded and ended the call, looking up at Lena. "They said it was okay, but I don't think they're happy about me being in a strange place."

Lena wrinkled her nose. "What do you say I stay with you until you get where you're going?"

The girl's cautious eyes bored into Lena. "Why would you do that?"

The corner of Lena's mouth quirked up. "Let's just say I'm one of the good guys."


Another hour passed before the train heading to Marie's destination rolled through, and in the meantime, they picked up a lunch on Lena's dime and talked. The girl asked Lena's name, which made Lena choke on her hoagie momentarily.

"Trrrr...ac...y?" It was a shitty attempt to sound normal, and the uncertainty drew the girl's eyes into fine slits. She was a shrewd one to begin with, but Lena's slip-up was only easily missed by the daft.

The girl said nothing personally revealing but did mention her love of older comics and heroes. Lena couldn't help but smile as the girl pulled out an old Overwatch issued comic - more propaganda than actual entertainment, but it was still something. She was almost sure that if she'd bothered to talk to Zenyatta, he would have called this "clinging to the vestiges of the past" or something, but this little girl was obviously enamored by the heroes of not so old.

Thankfully, this wasn't one of the comics starring her. Even so, the little girl gave her a smile, her dark eyes glittering.

"You look familiar, you know?" Marie laughed. "You almost look like Tracer."

Lena's heart skipped, but she tried to play light. Sometimes her survival instinct was worth a hoot. "Pshhh, if only I could be as great as she is. Don't get me wrong, I get that a lot, but I'm not nearly that good looking."

The girl wrinkled her nose back at Lena and laughed. "She is pretty cute."

Embarrassed little butterflies fluttered around Lena's stomach for a minute as she covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. She noticed the girls watchful eyes cease at the corners only briefly in a smile before going back to their increasingly haunting stare.

She'd learned a few things about Marie. Marie enjoyed old Overwatch comics because it reminded her that there were still heroes out there watching her back. Marie wanted to go into science. Some kind of chemistry stuff that Winston might have understood, but it was already out of Lena's depth despite the young girl's age. Marie had been in Venice the day of the mass bombing of the peace rally.

She'd only mentioned it offhandedly, but Lena could see the darkness in her eyes. It wasn't hard to imagine. So many had been there. So many lives lost. So many lives affected.

"Let me ask you something, kiddo?"

The girl looked up from her glossy paged comic. "Back to kiddo?"

Lena felt herself smile but pushed forward. "Why are you really so interested in the old heroes even with everything that's been happening?" She waved a hand. "Venice… Heerenveen … Rio…" She shrugged. "Where are the heroes?"

The little girl looked up with a, what Lena discerned, rare smile on her dark lips. "They're right here, helping us. I don't think they hurt people in Venice. Not the good people, anyway. They're helping people in Brazil, probably. The news says that the people are fighting back, and that has to be… that has to be the good guys helping." She shrugged, turning a little pink. "I don't think I know where that other place is, though."

Lena shrugged, leaning back against the train car's seat. Her voice was quiet, but even she could hear the strain of her vocal cords as the stuffed down the tears. She didn't even know the answer to the question she intended to ask. "How can you be so sure?"

The girl looked at Lena, mouth tilted in a skeptical, no nonsense frown. "You really need to find a better name other than 'Tracy.'"


Amélie looked out over the city, waves of nausea washing over her. She thought going back to Paris would facilitate some kind of good memory, but it didn't work. All that had happened besides dizzying confusion with every painful thought was a corpse a few blocks away. He'd gotten too familiar with her, and she'd snapped back into the killer that Talon had shaped her into.

Never again would another man touch her skin.

"You don't have to kill anymore," Gérard whispered quietly in her mind.

She sighed as she leaned her back against a chimney stack. "I didn't want to… It simply… happened."

She thought she could hear him sigh. Not in irritation. In sympathy maybe.

Oh, she missed her sweet love, especially being alone now. Alone in the night. The smell of blood in her nostrils and the height of the kill still thrumming deeply in her veins. She didn't want that sickeningly divine feeling within her, the transcendent glow of a kill… The real ecstatic love was in the brutality and grace of a kill - not in some unreliable person.

Death was always the same. Death never changes.

More than once had Death crossed Amélie's mind. She just wanted to be free of these chains. They felt so heavy… And she felt so… alone…

Every time the thought passed through the desolate, charred wasteland of Amélie's mind, the obnoxious giggle and quip of a little British girl followed in hot pursuit. As always. A little British girl nipping at the heels of misfortune.

It almost made her smile.

Almost.

But not quite.

She abandoned you like everyone else.

She remembered in vivid detail the sweat on Lena's skin as they fled into the snow-powdered outskirts of Heerenveen. She remembered the terror pushing her forward and causing her feet to stumble. She remembered the paralysis at the thought of pulling the trigger, no matter whether it would save her life or not.

She could remember the smell of Lena's perfume and the way the light caught on her chronal accelerator. She smelled the acrid smell of smoke and the cloying powder of brick dust. She remembered smelling blood and gore… Intestines exploded and arteries lacerated. She now could almost hear Lena's quick breathing during their flight, almost like her breathing when she was aroused only less erratic and more calm.

Amélie remembered that sound very well. She remembered Lena's quick, unsteady breath against her lips. She remembered the taste of Lena's skin and the tentative shyness in her kiss. She remembered warmth spreading over her and the way Lena's hands went to her hips as if holding her in the present… as if holding herself in the present. Oh, she relished that feeling. That memory.

But the pain still outweighed the pleasure.

Abandonment.

The thing was not quite Amélie thought about her flight through the countryside, avoiding small towns… Scavenging for scraps of food and cloth. Even now she looked like a starved skeleton wrapped in nothing but strips and squares of discarded or repurposed cloth. She looked like a scarecrow, some thing of evil warding off the good.

Amélie found herself speaking aloud. "Would she come after me again?"

Then, she laughed at herself - a cold, unforgiving laugh that was not quite her own. "Of course not. You shot at her, remember?"

Amélie did, in fact, remember shooting at the ground, spraying up dirt and debris and snow. She pulled the improvised jacket, held together by little more than duct tape and safety pins, closer around her shoulders.

She remembered shooting Lena in Drachten.

She remembered shooting Lena in London.

Every shot fired at the silly girl seemed to bring her closer to Amélie. To Widowmaker. To whoever she now was or was turning into. It seemed like a war going on in her mind that the rustling past part of her was losing.

Amélie pushed her feverish skin against the cold stone chimney whose chill seeped through her puny outer layer. Her skin felt so hot. Too hot. She constantly perspired at any extended run, any outbreak of unsavory emotion, and somewhere within her she could remember it all happening to her regularly.

It was like… Inhabiting a body that was not her own.

She'd been trapped under a thick layer of ice for so long that the sun's faintest rays burned long marks into her flesh, unseen but still there, exposing her to the world as unnatural.

Inhuman.

"You need to get moving," he urged her again.

She groaned, feeling weakness overcome her limbs again for what could have only been the hundredth time that night. She was so hungry… But she had to keep moving forward. To where, she did not know, but that didn't stop her from continuing onward. She would find something. Peace, maybe.

No, whispered another part of her mind. You'll never know peace. You live for the thrill of the fight and for bloodshed. No monster like yourself could ever find peace. The only peace you ever had in your grasp was in Reyes' hands, and you threw it away like some ungrateful, foolish child.

Amélie leaned her head back, feeling the night's cold air against her burning flesh, and closed her eyes for a long moment, trying to focus on the present.

She couldn't go back.

She didn't know how to move forward.

All she could do was wander.

She took off, running across flat spots and leaping short distances, more afraid of falling than she thought she ever had been before. Had she been this afraid when she'd still been truly Amélie? Only once. Only when she'd begged anyone to tell her news of her husband after an assassination attempt.

No one had known the future - if Gérard had been alive, but they had to all walk in blind.

She was running around completely sightless, evolved out of her sight then thrown into a place where the scales had been ripped from her eyes - thrown into a terrifying world after so many years.

Alone.

"Get to the safe place, then you can rest."

She laughed bitterly to herself as she trotted down a few dozen alleyways. Her dead husband was her only voice of reason anymore. She knew that this was something… incredibly concerning in any normal circumstance, but it kept her going for now.

The shaft of purple and pink light spilled from a crack in the door she looked for. No one thought twice of her there. She looked like everyone else under the lights even though her face was gaunt. There, she'd seen herself in a mirror for the first time since coming to some kind of her senses and staggered away.

The memory of her as she once was - skin the color of tanned calf leather, eyes a warm honeyed brown, raven black hair not different than now except its thickness. The woman she'd seen in the mirror in Venice.

It hurt to remember.

She slipped through the open door of the hostel and tucked away on a couch, resting her eyes until people started filing in from the nightly bar crawls. She would escape again into the night. She paid her due fees at the beginning of her stay, having stolen from so many people in small amounts and veiled herself in normal clothing over her suit, which she also stole.

One day, she wished to pay back her bad habit to keep herself alive, but she'd never been quite successful going out and picking up food not left behind by others. How could she go into any market… How could she have honest work when she looked like…

When Talon was still after her…

When she was such a monster.

Until then, she would sleep.

She was too tired to fear it much before her eyes slipped closed. This night she would leave Paris.


Amélie didn't leave Paris that night.

Instead, she prowled around, bumping into some late night bustling tourists. And… Some people who just didn't seem to sleep. Paris didn't sleep. She used to be one of those people.

Now, she needed to nap every few hours to keep moving. Never a long sleep. That's when the nightmares began. And that's when she emerged from her hiding spot and into the revealing light.

Despite the ambient city noise, she could hear the Seine River burbling not too far away as she left her hostel, a converted hotel turned into a crash pad not long after October's mess in Venice. Many people and omnics fled the city, seeking refuge in omnic-supportive places. Many hotels, out of charity rather than government interference, turned into cheap hostels or significantly cut their rates.

France wasn't exactly omnic-friendly, but it wasn't actively against them either.

To think… Her home now looked down its nose at her, thinking her strange and not worth the trouble.

She walked these streets day and night, sometimes in her sweats after rehearsals - her body trembled at the memory of spotlights like medical lamps over her - and sometimes dressed to the teeth, hand in hand with her beloved.

Oh, she missed him.

"I never left," he whispered to her quietly as the chilly air bit her cheeks.

She trailed her chilled fingers over the brick of a building, wondering how long it would be before she had to leave. The memories were getting stronger the longer she stayed, but what did that actually mean?

The pain had been swelling with every new memory that overwhelmed her.

The urges to kill becoming hard to control the longer she was around strangers.

Everything seemed so frightening and foreign. She felt like a child lost in a dizzying crowd with nothing to cling to except her own arms, which crossed over her chest protectively as she rounded another corner and heard a 24-hour club still raving into the late night that was steadily turning morning. It was close to four.

Amélie shook her head clear of her desire to go there, but the longing remained. She missed the feeling of warm bodies and simple enjoyment. She missed hot food. She missed sweaters and nonthreatening company, and despite her rational brain's chastisement, she missed Gérard Lacroix and Lena Oxton.

She missed the breathless exhilaration standing under the lights in the Palais Garnier and the Place de l'Opéra, executing every move flawlessly, knowing her partners would do the same. She missed gliding across the floors, straining with familiar effort. She missed the makeup and the uncomfortable dressings that they wanted her to wear instead of the skin tight catsuit pinching her under her street clothes. She missed performing the yearly Black Swan Benefit, a charity developed by none other than herself to aid children orphaned by crisis and war. She missed being the lead role in so many good things, knowing that she'd taken on a terrible identity against her will. She missed the memory of dancing not being a bitter taste in her mouth. She missed being Odette and loathed her position now as some unholy Odile. She missed seeing Gérard's smiling face, though such a goofy expression might have been unrefined in such a prestigious environment.

But then… Gérard would never come back to her, not in this life.

Maybe none of her former joys would ever reign so strongly as they once had. Maybe they would never come back at all.

Maybe, though.

Maybe that silly girl with fifty-seven freckles on her face and a stubborn heart would cross paths with her again.

Maybe Lena didn't want to see Amélie.

And maybe Amélie didn't want to see Lena.

She wouldn't know until that day came, if ever.