"This is bullshit."

"I'm sure that Angela and Jack shared a reason for not giving us a teleporter for the trip…" Even though it would have been nice, she didn't need to say but thought anyway.

The large, lovely woman beside her shook her head. "No, my little ice bear. They send us away at every turn of battle. Do they forget that we are as accustomed to war as they?"

Mei chewed on her lip and looked down the narrow passageway to the hidden hangar. She still had a few friends and colleagues that she could count on in a pinch. "I don't think it's because they think we're incompetent."

"Then why?" Her words weren't even hostile, but Mei felt sweat prickle under her arms.

"Uh, um…" She remembered back to Angela talking to her before the mission she and Zarya had been sent on.

"Listen, I don't question your capabilities, but I do think that having Zarya on board in a place like Rio… Well… I feel like it's a disaster waiting to happen. There will be a mixed crowd, and in the heat of battle, I would really like it if we could keep our friends our friends."

She'd been talking about the omnics, of course.

"You know why, Aleksandra…" She didn't really want to say it, but they couldn't deny that Zarya had a tendency to be a little indiscriminate when it came to firing into a crowd. She wouldn't hesitate to rip through innocently bystanding omnics to hit the guy behind them, and that was what Overwatch wanted to avoid precisely.

They'd already been blamed for a Tekhartha's death twice. There was no need to give the media any more power to hurt them.

Mei's ginormous girlfriend smiled wolfishly. "They know who I am."

But Mei just sighed and approached one of the planes they'd be taking southward. "You're a massive teddy bear. You even like Zenyatta."

Aleksandra rolled a large shoulder coated in a puffy outer layer of magenta coat, but her eyes were still playful despite her snarl. Mei turned to walk up the cargo shuttle's boarding ramp, but she turned to glance at her strong-goddess girlfriend when she didn't hear heavy boots clomping up behind her.

"He's different. He understands." She paused for a long moment, putting a pink-nailed finger to her lips in thought. "You know what I'd like?" Mei's heart skipped as Aleksandra Zaryanova leaned against her enormous rifle with her scarred eyebrow quirked up, a mischievous grin on her face.

Mei could feel her face positively burning. "Wh-what's that?"

"I'd like to break in this ship proper. How long do we have before we have to go? Twenty minutes, would you say?"

Mei began twisting the fingers on her thinsulate gloves nervously. "Uh, yes. That would put us ahead of the storm so we don't… get caught…"

A flash of numbness overwhelmed her, chilling her down to her marrow as she remembered sitting there, blankly staring at another flatlined comrade in their cryo-pod. The storm…

Mei shook her head and looked away from the concrete floor back up at Aleksandra whose face was less enthusiastically impish but still rather impish. "Are you okay, myshka?"

Mei managed to smile and push up her glasses before remembering exactly how Aleksandra wanted to spend those twenty minutes but… it had been a day or two…

"Let's… uh… let's get the heater going. Yeah?"

Aleksandra resumed her smug grin and clomped up behind Mei, setting down their few things in the cargo hold and pressing the lock on the ramp to make it close up. Mei went to the control board and typed in a few quick things. All Overwatch personnel had to know a little something about flying - at least enough to get you from point A to point B with an auto-pilot function, which was exactly what Mei Lin-Zhou was doing.

"Oh!" Aleksandra exclaimed excitedly. She plopped herself down on the left bench and went looking through one of her pockets with a wide grin like a child's. She apparently found what she was looking for in her pocket and went, "Oh…"

Mei glanced over, frowning. It was rare that Aleksandra sounded so forlorn. "What is it? Are you alright?"

The pink haired beauty shrugged. "I picked a flower I saw because I thought it was nice, but it got very crushed in my pocket."

Mei fixed her glasses and ambled over to where her girlfriend sat. The flower - a snowdrop - wasn't nearly as crushed as Aleksandra let on.

"I can make it work!" She clapped her hands and flapped them a little but started to feel silly.

Aleksandra caught her in a quick kiss to distract her from her shame and let Mei work her ice magic on the little flower, setting it on the dashboard like a crystalline pendant, and Zarya caught her lips again, this time more intensely passionate.

When Mei pulled back from the warm glowing sun that was her girlfriend, she sighed a little. "We… uh… we do have twenty minutes or so."

Aleksandra smiled, her pretty delicate lips parting in a canine grin. "I'll make up for lost time then, yes?"

Feeling a little nervous like she always did, Mei sighed again with a little laugh. "Oh."


Mei adjusted her glasses and pulled back on her gloves before having to take them off again to fix her misaligned buttons on her coat. The plane started up on its own but wouldn't take off without someone in the pilot seat. She guessed it would be her and Aleksandra in the co-pilot seat, but she didn't mind. She'd been on cargo ship carries more than once and done all of the same things by herself. This time, she just had some company.

"So, what do you think they're going to want to do once we ice him?"

Aleksandra spun her chair three times before slowing down, grinning like a schoolkid. Sometimes it was kinda funny to just watch her. Mei was convinced that the others saw her as someone who was incredibly serious under the surface, but the only things she was actually serious about were omnics, her past, and getting down and dirty at the most inappropriate times. Otherwise, she was as jovial and playful as anyone with a life of comforts and well-wishing. In some ways, she seemed incredibly childlike - in her wonder of the world and… of Mei. Mei couldn't ever really understand what Zarya saw in her, but she wasn't displeased that her girlfriend did love her. Besides, their science talks always hit opposite ends of the spectrum and met in the middle. That was always exciting.

"Did you really just make this joke?"

Mei beamed even though she knew her cheeks went pink, but then again, maybe they never faded from their redness of earlier activities. She shot finger guns at Alexandra with a confident smile. She knew that she could handle this small mission alone, and having her beloved there with her was only improving her mood, not to mention how utterly at ease she felt there alone with Aleksandra.

The gravity of their mission hadn't really hit home for Mei just yet. Maybe that's why I'm in such a good mood. Most of her still felt like she was just running to the store really quick for some milk, but the rest of her was more than a little preoccupied with her looming anxiety. For the time, at least, it was easy enough to ignore.

Maybe that was just a little bit of afterglow left over.

"How long is the flight?" Zarya yawned widely and ran a hand through her shock of pink hair, and Mei couldn't help but remember how her girlfriend had taken Lena in her arms and swung her around after learning about her pink hair dye gift.

"We will be like twins, yes? The pup and the bear."

Her nostalgia tinted grey and melancholy at the thought of Lena. She'd been the one to get everyone into this mess, but Mei couldn't be mad about it. Everyone else blustered and felt overly self-righteous, but she knew as well as anyone that they would do the exact same things for the people they loved. Mei was just the only one to admit it to herself and accept it.

"It's only about six hours, which isn't too bad, I think." Mei swirled her chair around once to mimic Aleksandra. "What do you want to do?"

Aleksandra grimaced. "Sitting around that long bothers me."

Mei finally let go of the plane's controls attached to her chair, impotent in the face of the autopilot, and rolled her eyes. "You don't seem to mind when it's at home."

The large woman rolled a very poofy shoulder. "This is not home."

"So… what do you wanna do?" Mei caught herself twisting the fingers of her gloves again and placed her empty hands in her lap.

Aleksandra, who had sprawled out in her chair as if it were one of the recliners from home, just stared blankly at Mei, who groaned. "I'm gonna need a while before I'm up to that again."

Aleksandra offered her girlfriend a lovely ursine grin. "We have six hours. Take your time."

"Okay, so um… that aside…"

Abruptly, Aleksandra interrupted, her eyes glinting with the realization of an idea, but there was caution in them that made Mei nervous and blotting out a little of her blissful happiness. "What is it?"

"You do not talk about the Ecopoint very often, if at all. Why?"

She knew very damn well why, but Mei sighed, unbuckling herself from the pilot's chair. "Aleksandra, do we really have to do this now?"

Aleksandra set her strong jar in unwavering determination. "We have six hours."

"Might as well get it over with?"

Aleksandra nodded briskly.

They'd been together for the better part of a year, but every time that Ecopoint: Antarctica came up in conversation, Mei found herself needing to go do something else. They hadn't salvaged any of the material from the base and resorted to scavenging from Siberia and other eastern posts. They couldn't ever really afford to go too far without exposing themselves, but a quick plane ride here and there was never too much as long as they were careful. At first, they all had been too afraid to use their planes they managed to scavenge from the Swiss Headquarters, but by stealing back their own fuel and plane, they could fly around undetected.

Overwatch had the most advanced stealth tech of any organization or military force, so as long as they flew high, they could avoid detection and manage to do what they needed to. But… there was just one problem.

Their star pilot refused to fly, and no one was particularly confident enough to let anyone else fly in the face of less than ideal conditions.

The one they had to rely on most these days was Hana Song, and it wasn't particularly fair to rely on someone so young for so much.

"You do not have to, zvyozdochka." Zarya's face seemed a little too solemn, and Mei knew that she could relate. Her home…

She'd lost everyone…

"No, no. It's okay. Sorry. I got a little lost in thought there. Sorry." Mei adjusted her glasses and pulled her hair down from its bun.

"If it is too difficult…"

Mei shook her head and took a breath. She closed her eyes and tried to not let the frozen images of her friends overwhelm her. Their white eyes permanently open, unseeing but seeing all in their icy tomb.

Mei felt a warm pressure on her hand and opened her eyes to see Zarya squeezing her gloved fingers.

"It is okay."

"No, no. I, uh, I need to eventually." Mei tried to smile, but she knew it looked pitiful from the pained way Zarya's eyebrows twitched together for half a second.

Mei took another breath, feeling the warmth of the heater battering her face. She licked her lips and looked down at Zarya's hand clasping her own. "We thought we would be okay, you know." She looked up just for a second, long enough to see her girlfriend's teeth snag her bottom lip. "There was a storm rolling in, and we sent out a call to try to confirm that we wouldn't have to evacuate." She shivered but not from literal cold, just the chill of her own memories.

"Radio silence?" MacReady frowned, not knowing what really to do as much as anyone else.

Arrhenius leaned against one of the tables and looked out over the rest of the base from their extra thick windows. The solar array towers seemed to be in functional enough condition, and as long as they held, they would be safe. Mei looked down at one of the panels.

[Battery power sufficient: 97% Temperature: -41C]

Arrhenius sighed. "I guess that means that either our comms were knocked out or that they're taking care of things too much to answer a lowly Ecopoint outpost."

MacReady moved over to where Arrhenius was standing and threw their arm around the taller of the two. "Don't worry about it, Ar. This place was built to withstand polar storms, and you know it."

Mei chewed on her bottom lip. "Well, I uh… This storm looks bigger than any we've seen so far, and we're still no closer to finding an answer than we were six months ago." She had a very bad feeling about this…

"Adams, do we have any data on the wind speed?"

"Hmm… Our sensors are picking up 140 kilometer per hour winds right now, but they've been increasing steadily for the last fifteen minutes."

Mei touched the panel and zoomed in on Solar Tower #2, noting how one of the panels seemed a little dislodged. "Hey, Mac?"

"What's up?"

"We've got a loose panel on Tower 2. Do you think you can bolt it down before the storm gets here?"

They shook their head solemnly. "Adam says that the storm will be on us faster than even we thought."

Arrhenius lightly tapped the long table they leaned on with a lightly balled fist. "It's gotta be the comms."

Opara and Torres sat by idly, but the unease that settled over the six of them was more than a little obvious.

Adams, ever the optimist, smiled widely. "Like Mac said. This place is built to withstand storms."

Mei smiled back. "Yeah, I guess we just need to… chill out…"

Everyone in the room groaned in mock exasperation. Mei knew from the lowering shoulders that her comrades were at least a little calmed by some of her levity, but she was just as stressed and concerned as they. This storm…

Mei looked up into Aleksandra's eyes, which were dark and full of pity.

"You had no idea."

The words didn't do a lot to comfort Mei even though she'd mostly made her peace with it long ago. She let the negative waves of her own emotions wash over her and cleanse her body of any selfishness, which she often did when she felt a little too self-pitying. "No, but it still feels bad… I feel like I should have seen the panel sooner. I could have saved my friends' lives."

Aleksandra Zaryanova frowned. "Hmm… well… you do wear glasses."

Mei frowned back at her before sticking her tongue out. "My vision isn't that bad!"

"Are you kidding? You're, uh, what is the word…" Zarya put a thoughtful finger to her lips. "Ah, yes, that it is in English. You are snowblind."

Mei rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair with one hand over her chest. "Oh," she said in as monotone a voice as possible. "You got me."

Zarya beamed like the sun reflecting off planes of white tundra.

The light brought by that smile banished the darkness of memory, at least temporarily.

Mei started off again, but found her energy dwindling for the subject. "Anyway… I… I don't know."

Her large girlfriend patted her hand gently. "It is okay. I will tell you a story from my childhood to help."

Even in her growing fatigue from reliving the worst times of her life, Mei managed to smile. "Sure."

Aleksandra nodded. "When I was small, when I was a tiiiiny child, I asked my uncle to take me down to the city. We lived in a small village then, but we preferred it there. Quiet. Calm." She lolled her head to look up at the ship's roof. "My uncle refused. He refused and refused me. Because I was so small, I did not understand.

'We are safe here,' he said to me over and over.

But I didn't listen to him. I begged of him. My mother had fallen ill in the last month, and she could not take me to the city like she would every now and again. With my father being… gone… she tried her best to protect me. My uncle was my father at this point, yes?"

Mei nodded. She knew a little about Zarya's past but not enough, she felt. She knew that her father had been killed when she was just a small child and that her uncle had become her father figure, but she had no clue about her girlfriend's mother. Is that why she won't go home?

She'd tried time and time again over the last year to get Aleksandra to open up more, but she'd always say something like, 'It's in the past, now.'

"I finally convince him to go one day since it seemed like things had died down in the city." Her large sweeping motions weren't strange to Mei anymore. At first, she'd thought Zarya insincere because of her need to exaggerate everything with her arms, but then she learned that… that was just Aleksandra Zaryanova's way. "He tells me to be careful when we got off the train, but I was too excited. He promises me that he'll take me to my favorite store and let me pick out my favorite candy." She shook her head. "We did not know how bad the city was. The news was quiet then, but when we left the station, it was a disaster area. He tries to get me back into the station, but the guards will not let us in."

Leaning forward, Zarya's eyes sparkled the way they most often did when she was telling glory stories. Her excitement was nearly tangible and definitely communicable. "Out of the next street come a horde of those robot beasts, and my uncle calmly says to me," She lowered her voice even more than it already was. "'Aleksandra, stand behind me and watch how this Zarya does it.'"

Something in Mei's mind clicked. If anyone had shortened her last name, it would have driven her nuts. But suddenly… it made sense that Aleksandra would keep the nickname. Her uncle had been her everything to her for years.

"He pulls out a pistol as big as my head from his belt buckle and-" In a flash, she whipped up her left hand, which was in an L and pointed towards her. "bang!"

Her sudden burst made Mei jump a little, but she laughed despite her trilling heartbeat.

"He took down twenty before the train guard did anything to help, and I know he took down more than any of the others." Reverently but almost subconsciously it seemed, Zarya put her fist to her chest, thumb against her sternum. The movement made her jacket squeak. She almost always did that when she talked about her uncle or any of his heroism.

Uncertain how to respond as she always was when Aleksandra reveled in omnic death, Mei smiled at her girlfriend. Somewhere, she was still deeply unsettled by Aleksandra's… overt hatred of the poor people, but she could also understand from where her terrible suspicion and rejection came. She was doing her best to overcome her general despairity regarding the group, but her racism was incredibly upsetting for everyone else.

I don't know how Zenyatta can manage to be so calm…

But another voice whispered, At least she isn't talking about slaughtering his people in front of him?

She shook her head. She wouldn't excuse that kind of thinking, no matter the person. She is getting better, at least…

Zarya's eyes fell to her hand clasping both of Mei's. She sighed with a small smile. "I know it upsets you to think about death, kotyonok… my little kitten." Mei felt her cheeks get warmer when Zarya squeezed her hand reassuringly. "I do not like to think about death either, but those of us who are unfortunate enough to have been immersed in it are more immune to its touches on our minds."

Dead… All dead… Adams… Torres… MacReady… All dead…

Mei looked up at her girlfriend but didn't even try to smile though she felt the need to reassure rather than be reassured. "Death does not define us."

Zarya shook her head. "No, it doesn't... " Silence. Uncomfortable silence. "We must all face those we have lost eventually."

Sooner than later maybe


Mei Ling-Zhou looked down at the frosty containers that held her friends and only felt a slight pang of sadness instead of what she'd felt on the plane. The way she'd remembered their eyes… their white and horribly unseeing eyes…

The icy coffins were completely frosted over from the inside, and her gratefulness was not at all short-lived. Her fingers brushed the dusty table where she'd sat not too long ago, it seemed, but then again, her memories of the time she was here were warped and faded around the edges. Had that been her mug sitting over by a frost encrusted computer screen that had been cracked and battered by debris? Had the computer been shattered when she'd managed to leave? When had it shattered?

"Are you alright, Mei?"

Mei started, pulling her gloved fingers away from the table and her eyes to Zarya. It was so rare that she used anything other than a pet name.

"Y-yes. I'm fine. It's best not to talk too much with the cold. Our balaclavas will freeze."

Zarya just nodded without saying anything. She'd been in Siberia. She'd served in the Siberian army and faced cold almost as drastic as this. Almost… If anyone knew how the cold affected breath vapor, it would be her girlfriend.

Zarya pointed at one of the cryo-beds. It was empty and for good reason. Mei shook her head and pointed to one two down. She tried to avoid reading the names on the screens, but those screens were just as frosted over as the corpses inside. Except for… The one that Zarya pointed at just moments before. Snow drifts had come through the broken windows to shield some of the spatter on the cryo-bed, but Mei knew it was there. Mei could see it through the powdery white-blue blanket. That had been Opara's cryo-bed.

Opara had been the one to take the loose panel from Tower #2 to the gut. Mei knew that she'd died instantly and that she never would have known, but when Mei thawed from her necessary sleep, she'd found one of her friends completely severed in half, blood everywhere. There wasn't even stink from the laceration of intestines. They'd frozen over. Everything had frozen over.

But Mei, still groggy and sick from cryo, managed to pull her friend out of the chamber and bury her on the grounds. Under the stairs.

Left hand staircase on the way from the heli-pad.

Mei shook her head for what felt like the billionth time as Aleksandra rocked one of the cryo-beds back and forth until she dislodged it from its port. Mei was sure that Winston could build a port relatively easy. All you needed was steady electricity supply and a generator specifically linked to the port. The cryo-tech was embedded in the pod's setup rather than any externally controlled system so that pods could be changed out as needed.

Her endothermic blaster was modeled off of the same tech as the cryo-pods, and she could do minor repairs on her own equipment, but she'd taught Winston the basics on how to fix up less complicated cryo-tech, and she'd shared what little information she'd been able to salvage from this particular Ecopoint.

She'd been researching how everything related with the omnic population increase and the more and more bizarre weather, but she was as close to putting things together as she had been when she'd first been at Ecopoint: Antarctica.

"How far is hike back? I may need break."

Mei frowned. "The complex isn't that big."

Aleksandra's face was almost entirely covered by a balaclava, but Mei could see strain in her posture. For the casual way that Aleksandra tossed the pod on her shoulder, the pod weighed almost 500 kilograms. Aleksandra's all time max weight just did break that limit, and it was no wonder that she was more than a little taxed.

"Let us go." The towering Aleksandra Zaryanova hunched over with a crushing weight on her back - Atlas in the snow.

Mei led the way, leaving behind her former friends, no. Her frozen friends. They were still her friends in her heart even if they were long dead and frozen where no one could extract them.

She only wished that could be the most of her problems at the moment.

Only a few meters out of the complex, the two trudged slowly in the rising winds. A drift of snow pelted them, and with it a black figure shifted in the grey of driving snow. Mei stopped as Zarya trudged up beside her, tossing down the cryo-pod like a light bag with no valuables in it and drawing out her Fucking Massive Particle Cannon.

"What is that?" Zarya whispered in this wind.

Mei shook her head cautiously. She didn't know, but she did know that whatever it was wasn't supposed to be there. Their clothes should make them blend with their environment, but the Ecopoint behind them was but a dark background in an otherwise grey-white blur.

The black figure hesitated in the snow but then began drifting toward them faster than either thought possible.

"Get ready!" Zarya shouted, obviously casting off any possibility for hiding. Mei cringed, but her hand flew to her back, flipping on the cryo-container that would help her freeze her enemies. Her hands didn't shake, but her knees felt weak.

What is that thing?

Mei couldn't see her girlfriend's face, but she could hear the smile in her voice. Her hand went to her endothermic blaster from her back, and she swiped her surroundings clear of snow with her feet, digging up a small trough. It wasn't so much a fighting technique as a way to make sure her footing would hold.

The man in black coalesced, still fuzzy in the drifting snow, and approached, but no footfalls echoed in the near silent expanse, here. She wasn't sure if that spectre of a man would have made any noise, anyway - not once she realized who it was.

The chill in Mei's bones was not… that of fear. Nor was it of any negative emotion. Some part of her was more than alright - more than okay to die with her girlfriend and all of her friends that she'd left behind years ago.

She'd never seen her true opponent in the flesh, but she'd had nightmares about him based on the grainy images - a gritty figure emerging from the black with nothing but a skull for a face. The thing that struck her more than anything, though, was his eyes.

We can't fight him… Memory gored her like an angry bull. Lena's battered face. Angela's blackened throat. Jesse's arm torn clean off. Zenyatta's headless body resting on a metal slab. A chill that had nothing to do with the incoming storm washed over Mei.

We're going to die here.

The eyes….

The redness within them.

How the irises seemed to meld into his pupil.

How she could see them from five meters away.

She wasn't prepared for the darkness he emanated - not just metaphysically. Black flakes seemed to fall from him - volcanic ash in the whiteness of snow, a sign of a volcano on the edge of eruption.

She wasn't prepared for the sheer gravity of this man.

And she wasn't ready for the terror that oozed from every screeching nerve and brain cell in her body from his unmasked, nearly human face.

But her hands were steady on her blaster, and a buzzing thrill ignited her soul.

She hadn't gotten to fight except in the skirmishes in Heerenveen. She didn't like fighting, but something felt good about being able to contribute to something actually effective rather than something that just took up time and resources.

The man in black stood there for a time, only two meters setting them apart. Mei had half-expected a shot to have been fired already, but instead, the three stood apart, staring intently and silently.

"I haven't had a moment alone with the two of you," the gravelly voice roiled over the winds like millstones grinding together.

Neither of the women spoke, just stood there ready to throw up an ice wall to buy enough time to ready an attack.

He sighed, audible despite the storm rolling in. "You're so much less theatrical than the others. At the very least, they gave me a show."

Another pause extended a million centuries in every direction.

"Fine. Have it your way."

In a flash, belying the agonizing slowness with which the mist drifted lazily over the tundra, the man - no - the wraith, Reaper, whirled, tossing up black flecks and fresh, powdery snow. From the spray, however, Mei caught glimpse of his taloned, black gloved hand reach inside his cloak.

Her arm had sense enough to start moving without her brain doing much processing.

The first shot startled her (unlike the unshakable Zarya, no longer the tender Aleksandra here), but not enough for her to miss putting up the ice wall that would save their lives… for the moment. She thought she heard someone swear, but it was too hard to decipher who it was from the pound of her heart in her ears.

Zarya held down her trigger and planted her feet wide to brace herself for her particle cannon's secondary fire, which shot off just as the ice wall came down. In the place of the ghost-man was more black mist, but that only allowed the two of them to buy more time and prepare a second move.

While Zarya's blast missed its mark only because of incorporeality, it did blast up enough snow to blind a target - the drawback, though, obscuring the target.

Mei started moving within her cleared and packed disk of snow, but with the snowclothes, it wasn't necessarily as graceful as she would have liked. She had no complaints, though. The snowclothes would pad her from any lightweight shot since the innermost layer was light kevlar, and in some respect, they were just as natural to her as sweatpants and a sweater.

She could only trust that Zarya would cover her back in the same way she watched Zarya's, but she knew that their fighting styles would be different - her own imprecise until lethality compared to Zarya's. She wasn't going to endanger her girlfriend unnecessarily.

The snow spray fell and revealed nothing, making Mei back up until she nudged one of Zarya's boots.

"Where'd he go?" Mei whispered mostly to herself, scanning the fallen snow and the blurry horizons caused by falling snow.

She glanced to the side, just quickly enough to catch the last vestiges of ashen mist swirling in opposition of the wind.

"Z, your nine!"

Zarya was already moving. Her boot crunched and scrunched the snow with a pivot as she swung her particle cannon toward her nine o'clock range, firing off another round of secondary fire. She predicted the path well enough and sprayed up snow enough to block out another available shot from the phantom.

He's just as human as you or I, Mei-Ling Zhou, a wizened older woman said to her not too long ago.

"Break!" shouted Zarya just as a blind shot from Reaper drove them apart.

"Get me close!" Mei shouted. It wasn't loud enough for her to yell like that, but she did anyway.

Zarya snatched down her balaclava to show a fearsome, ursine grin of a bear, white teeth sparkling even in the white landscape. "Whatever you want."

Mei wasn't bloodthirsty enough to be warmed, so she kept her balaclava on her face.

The pink-purple light and strong hum of the particle cannon cut through the snow and cast auras, refracted light bursting in prismic fashion and casting rainbow glow over their immediate surroundings. Mei dragged her foot in the snow again and checked the monitor strapped into one of her gloves. Glowing blue letters happily announced: Blizzard charge: 40%

The particle cannon smoked out Reaper, who threw himself toward the spot not covered by the duo. Zarya couldn't move very well with her particle cannon - not unless she was running in a straight line, and lowered mobility in combination with external and environmental factors could be deadly. Mei had to act as an offensive unit and a defensive movement.

She took the cover and confusion as an opportunity and moved quickly, darting from her current position to one slightly diagonally and about a meter away. Another round of shotgun blasts rang out.

He's going easy on us. He has to be.

She took one more step, hearing the tell-tale hum of the particle cannon's primary fire, and paused. Black mist was already starting to form directly in front of her.

Almost subconsciously, her thumb clicked the endothermic blaster to secondary fire and she pulled up, both hands steadying her grip as an icicle formed on the end of her blaster.

Three… two… one… She fired, unblinking and unshaken.

Just as her finger pressed the trigger, Reaper, his maskless face, solidified in front of her - its sureness and grim smile contorting into rage and confusion for the briefest moment before pain and retribution bloomed with the bloodstains on his clothes.

She'd aimed for his heart but clearly missed, hitting him instead in the shoulder. She forgot how much pull the blaster had on its secondary fire. Blood splashed against the snow but faded after a few moments, and a horrible, terrible smile spread across Reaper's face.

His lips moved quickly, and Mei almost had to read them to understand what he'd said, but when it struck her, it chilled her to her core. "I'm stronger now than you'll ever know."

She shot again, but he dodged. Her hands still held strong.

Come on

"You're covered!" An opalescent barrier around her gave her an advantage that she tried not to waste.

She moved as quickly as she could, reaching out a hand to grab onto Reaper's cloak and pull him closer.

It would have been an instantly fatal move if Zarya hadn't thrown up her shield for Mei just in time. A compacted feeling hit her gut and nearly knocked the wind out of her but she soldiered on instead of taking that brief moment. Reaper had fired directly into the barrier in an attempt to fatally wound her, but that wouldn't stop her. Even if he had hit her… She'd do anything she could to protect Aleksandra.

She snatched the sleeve of his robe and yanked him close, putting her blaster against his stomach, and pulled the trigger without even the slightest hesitation.

"You need to chill the fuck out."

Mei didn't for a second think that her little shenanigans would kill the immortal hell that was Reaper, but it would absolutely hurt. And he'd hurt her friends enough to deserve that kind of pain. But for him… it was only temporary.

Her cuff's monitor beeped and she smiled, pushing him backward. With her left hand she reached back and popped a tab on her portable cryo-tank that fed her blaster. Her cuff blinked the prompt: Use voice activation code to commence sequence.

"Freeze! Don't move!"

A small droid - her only friend for so long - popped from the top of the cryo-tube and danced along, darting to Mei's indicated area. In a blink, her floppy eared drone spun its way over to the gasping Reaper and started spinning fast enough to pull a circle of snow into a vortex, mixing with the cryotech with the surroundings to create an inescapable freezing circle.

Through the wall of snow thrown skyward, Mei saw black smoke just barely slipping through the gap.

With that… the man in black fled across the tundra, and Aleksandra Zarynova followed.

Mei stood there, completely dumbfounded for a minute. It hadn't ever happen before that someone got out of her Blizzard, but then again, she hadn't used it on people very often. She'd mostly used it on stationary targets to best preserve all the essential life-giving parts, and only twice had she used it with the intent to kill. She only became okay with killing after realizing she was responsible for the deaths at the Ecopoint. Their blood was on her hands.

And now, when she needed to take a life the most, she couldn't.

Aleksandra started moving before Mei could snap out of her fugue state. The large Russian woman moved more agilely than Mei realized she could with the winter gear and the ever-thickening snowfall and managed to get far enough away from Mei to become only a dark grey blur in the snow.

Mei glanced down at the cryo-pod several meters away and shook her head. She couldn't carry it herself. She turned her attention to the perfectly circular disk of bluish ice and waddled over, picking up her battery-drained friend and clicking them back into place, and turning to go, she noticed a shard of ice with uncharacteristic black flecks. Frowning, she broke the chunk off and put it in her pocket to look at later. The cryotech would keep it preserved for an extended period of time, at least.

After a minute or so, Aleksandra was back with a frown fit to turn the strongest men to stone. "I'll get the pod. You get the plane started."

Mei started trotting, only just noticing how bad the blizzard was starting to get. She hadn't paid enough attention… She hadn't paid enough attention the last time she got caught in a blizzard, and five people had died. She slammed the release button on the side of the cargo craft and the boarding ramp groaned in frozen protest but did eventually dislodge just in time for Zarya to come trudging up with the pod slung over her back.

Mei's sense of time must have been screwy. She hadn't realized several minutes had passed.

Zarya boarded even before she, and the feeling that something was off persisted.

She took her place in the pilot's chair, already knowing what the screen would say but found herself pleasantly surprised.

Opara's severed torso rolled out of the cryo-pod with a sickening, heavy thump. One of her fingers broke off.

Mei started panting but the feeling started to go from her fingers.

Zarya's warm hands took hers off the controls and pulled her from the chair. "Is been long day. Sit and rest, kotyonok. I will fly."

Mei could only nod a little bit, feeling her fingers be freed of her gloves before realizing that she was pulling them off with the heat still off in the central cabin. The plane had been set to maintain a thawing temperature, but it was still a little too cold to sit around without gloves or jackets.

Hot air blasted her face and made her nose run, but her body felt too heavy and far for her to wipe away the post nasal drip, and her glasses fell down her nose almost to the point of falling off.

I'm not supposed to be alive.

We… aren't supposed to be alive.

They didn't get to live, so why do we?

Her mind played back the fight, and what a tiny skirmish it had been.

He'd fired off enough shots to throw down one set of shotguns, but not more than one set.

What was he doing?

"I think that man was trying to find out what we were doing."

Mei glanced up, her body feeling a little less foreign but just has heavy. She found herself unable to speak.

"I think… I think his intel was bad or unreliable."

"Why?" The word was flat and strained.

The answer was simple but chilling. "He let us win."

That's when Mei remembered the chunk of cryo-ice in her pocket. Control of her body snapped back like a rubber band, and her hand darted into her coat pocket to retrieve the entrapped fog. "I got something."

Zarya didn't look away from the control screen for another moment, but as soon as she hit the lock, she glanced over. "What is this?"

"I think…" It dawned on Mei, making her more warm and excited than she thought she could be. "I think this is part of his cellular makeup."

A pause from a confused looking Zarya.

"We can study it!" Mei added, waving her arms a little.

Zarya smiled at that. "We can take him down."

"We can kill him."

Zarya's wide eyes closed halfway in a feline expression, and she smiled. "You know, kitten, I heard you swear back there."

Mei's cheeks went hot and rosy. "Uh…"

"This is not something that I've heard before, yes?"

Mei couldn't look Zarya in the eye and set the chunk of Reaper-Ice on the dashboard alongside Zarya's gifted snowdrop. "I… don't usually."

Aleksandra sat with the same expression on her face before taking off her rabbit fur lined gloves and hat. "Is good sound. Very sexy."

Rosy wasn't a way to describe Mei's face at that point. She looked down and puffed out her blazing cheeks.

Zarya's warm hand touched the back of Mei's colder ones, making her look up despite her watering eyes. They did that when she was flustered.

"You look like you need hug. Yes?"

Mei nodded, and Aleksandra checked the monitor again before nodding to herself and unstrapping herself from the pilot's chair. She unbuckled Mei and pulled her into an embrace that reminded Mei of all the good times - laughing with her friends, knitting by a fire, making love to her girlfriend… And Zarya kissed Mei's neck, and Mei realized how long she'd been feeling less herself now that she felt safe, secure, and not threatened with ghosts.

"It is very sexy, kitten."

Mei looked up and puffed her cheeks again, looking over her glasses. "I can be sexy!"

Aleksandra's smile widened. "Show me, then."

Maybe it was the close brush with death, or may it was the sudden snap back from dissociation. Maybe it was even the relief that she'd been able to face one of her biggest fears, but when Mei-Ling Zhou snapped back to herself completely, she was positively ravenous for Russian desert.