Chapter 8: Truth

It was a quarter past four when they returned from their trip; a good half hour past what they had promised. Alejandra hadn't made so much as a sound on the short walk back to her home and hadn't taken a single bite of the food she so desired before. While Brian had devoured his part of the order, he too remained silent on their way after the brief round of questions from the authorities. He still could not fathom why she was so upset by his actions, being a victim of similar acts of random violence herself. Even the police had offered him some praise in his apprehension of the young criminals without any injuries that would last after a round of biotics treatment and the march of time. His own brother had been through worse in the incident that put him in an arm cast, an event the ended up leading the both of them to the San Francisco Overwatch museum in a moment of pity he had for his young brother. Even now the irony of that amused him, but it did little to soothe the sting of Alejandra's mysterious disappointment in him.

Finally walking through the door of Panadería Las Nieblas, her family's bakery, they were lucky to find only a light bustle of business in their way. Alejandra's mother was already trapped in another routine exchange over the daily specials and only just managed to notice the pair returning. Her first name was Meche, according to a comment he'd once overheard during business, but that mattered little to Brian, he rarely referred to people by their names no matter how familiar they were. Her brow furrowed upon sighting the would-be hero, who now realized why Alejandra had been so engrossed with her phone while he had stepped away to explain the situation to the authorities. This unpleasant glance lasted half a second before it shifted back to a neutral expression aimed at the customer.

Brian had expected to have an uncomfortable and awkward conversation over his apparent mistake, but he would prefer it be face to face with Alejandra and no one else. Regardless, none of them were in any position to have such a talk.

The mundane discussion finally over, an order rang out just as Alejandra thought she had snuck by unnoticed.

"Alé!", her mother said

Turning to face her mother, the baker's daughter could do little to hide her conflicted emotions as her eyes could only just make contact with her mother's. Taking a moment to read her daughter's feelings carefully, seeing an all too common sorrow mixed with a myriad of other sour emotions, Meche gave the same instruction she always had to take her daughter's mind off her troubles.

"We need the sweet bread sorted and bagged," she ordered, "you should start working on it now while your cocoa is warming up."

It was a simple and proven method to ease Alejandra's worries. Sorting was a simple enough task to be stress-free, but involved enough to take her mind off her troubles and the role of the cocoa was self-explanatory. Finally making a steady lock in her gaze and prostrated upon hearing this news, Alejandra's voice finally rose above a murmur for the first time in nearly an hour as she simply replied with an eager, "Ok."

Alejandra set to her familiar task with an almost desperate speed. She slid through the light foot traffic and into the spacious kitchen behind the business counter. While Brian lacked an understanding of this common situation, he was glad something had lifted her spirits. Meche's clear ire returned when she looked at Brian. Still oblivious as to what he had done to deserve all this, he reserved to discover why on his own once Alejandra had gathered herself. With a few brief silent stutters, he made an attempt at reassuring the woman who knew more of what he had done than he did. "I'll talk with her about it when she's done." Alejandra's mother wasn't given much of an opportunity to respond as another customer approached with their own monotonous questions, but she managed to reply with an icy sneer. "Good, that's what she had planned too." With a pause and a stiff nod, Brian moved on as if they had agreed on anything.

Rushing down the stairs with an almost indecent haste, he entered their basement. The cluttered and dank room acted as little more than a spacious storage room with a small area set aside for the washer and dryer. As his benefactors lacked a spare room for him to rest in, he took a seat atop his beat up sleeping bag in the only free space they could find for him and set his back to the wall. Finally in a position where he could find relative peace, his emotions began to twist and turn between his many ambivalent feelings, empathetic one microsecond and frustrated the next. He could not help but feel robbed by of the sanguine sense he had always felt after victory against the objectively wicked, but one look from the baker's daughter left him with nothing as his reward for heroism. Staring down to the splatter of red still on his pant leg, he considered how he might explain the event to Alejandra.

"It can't be that simple, can it? I've seen guys messed up worse than that back home, so she's gotta have seen just as much. Was it a too soon sort of thing? If it was in the leg I'd get that, but one in the hand doesn't make much sense. Besides, he pulled the knife on me, what part of that didn't she get? He got what he deserved. Then again, she did seem new to this, which also makes no sense."

No angle of it was logical to him. Alejandra was not someone who was ignorant of the need for violence to match violence, yet was still acting as if she was shocked by a level of it below what she had done to save him. There were few who Brian truly respected and Alejandra made that list by matching the courage he had shown many months ago on the day they met. Even if this incomprehensible disgust ended up being as simple as her becoming queasy at the sight of blood, that would only heighten his respect for her, even if he would understand her significantly less.

"Shooting a guy is way worse than anything I've ever done, so what's so wrong with a stab?"

Whatever the case, it would be a bad idea to speak with this bloody reminder still on his person. The tear in his lucky charm would have to wait for later, as Alejandra held control of all the supplies he needed for it. Pulling his duffel bag closer, he withdrew a replacement pair of pants and silently cursed that the law demanded he turn over Raf's folding knife. It was a new custom for Brian, one he only started to keep not long after he passed through Los Angeles, where he would keep any blade pulled against him as a trophy. As of now, they numbered low enough to barely need two hands to count, but his true concern for the moment was the two remaining pairs of pants. Khaki wasn't his preferred color, but as his only other choice was a black pair, given his ultimately wise decision to travel light, it was the superior option. Unlacing his shoes, removing his regular pair of grey, and replacing them at the fastest speed his awkward position within the room allowed him, he returned to his thoughts as he took the stained pair to the sink across from the washer.

"Not exactly easy to apologize when you don't know what's wrong, but I can't just ask her, can I?"

Experience told him to run the tap on cold, given his questionable familiarity with this situation. He held the stain directly under the chilling flow. He had done what he could to absorb the red splatter with a clutch of napkins before the police had arrived at El Macho Taco, but even then he knew that wouldn't be enough. Reaching for a bar of cracked soap looked that likely hadn't been used in years, he rubbed the damp cloth with vigor for some time. With a slap to the lever, the water shut off and he walked a pace away to cupboard on the floor, taking a near-empty miniature spray bottle of stain remover. "I got nothing to go on, so I'm gonna have to, but there's no way she's gonna like it." After a generous application that ended with the pump sputtering and a brief moment of time to let it soak, he dug through the cupboard again, finding the Ammonia solution placed disconcertingly close to a jug of bleach. Carefully pouring a small measure of the diluted mixture into the provided cup, Brian soaked a cotton swab and delicately dabbed it onto the sullied area. Once the solution had run out, he opened the lid of the washer and hit the button for automatic wash, trusting the sensors to give proper treatment. "Feels like a waste to do just one thing, but it's better than leaving a reminder."

Two hours ago, Brian never imagined that he would leave a fight with regret, but one simple look in Alejandra's eyes was enough to set the feeling of doubt in his heart. He almost had to remind himself that they had known each other for less than a week with how quickly he had gained a genuine liking and respect for the girl due in no small part to her saving his life. There were limits to this respect, of course, as her current attitude implied a wish for Brian to stop his attempts at heroics, something that he would not do for anyone. He never had been the sociable sort before, so feelings this complex were fairly new to him, and he could not wrap his head around any part of it.

"Guess there's nothing for it, I'll just have to look like the asshole and ask what I did wrong."

...

Several minutes later, many of which were spent waiting for the remainder of her mysterious shock to wear off, he ascended one flight of stairs to learn Alejandra had finished her task from a still disappointed Meche and ascended one more to accomplish his own. Her door was shut tight with only the faint melodies of mid-fifties soft-rock to tell him the room was occupied. Though the genre fell out of public favor in the early 2000's, the early fifties brought about a sudden and much-needed revival that lasted well into the sixties before being usurped by Pop and Electronic once again. Brian recognized the song, for all blood-hatred he had-and was meant to have- for San Franciscans as an Oaklander, he had to admit he had a fondness for their street performers taste in music, save for the neo-indie bands, he felt they were experimenting for the sake of experimenting rather than out of true artistic vision. Deciding it best to ease into the unpleasant meat of the conversation, he pulled his knowledge of the genre to the front of his mind as he softly knocked on the door.

"Hey, it's me." Met with no response, he continued with some awkwardness. "Uh, 'Diamond Wind', right?"

"Yeah.", she answered with most of her prior feeble tone diminished and replaced with one of intrigue. "You a fan?"

"Yeah, but I think they went downhill after Stones & Stardust. Just wasn't the same without Joseph"

"Yeah…" With it clear that his attempts at easing in failed, he said what needed to be said. "...Can I come in so we can talk about, you know, it?"

Silence fell again as she considered and finally answered.

"...Okay."

Near inaudible footsteps approached the door and Brian stepped back to make room out of some much need courtesy. Looking into each other's eyes for the first time since the incident at the Taco shop, both wore the same expression of conflicting determination and unease.

Brian never had been inside her, or indeed any girl's, room before and he was relieved to find she avoided most of the female stereotypes he had been led to believe. The closest thing to concerning was an old Overwatch poster pinned to the same wall as her bed, but he had owned a few himself before their downfall and saw no problem with revering them now. There was little else that stuck out, at least to Brian, she kept the room very clean and organized with all other decoration being fairly generic map paintings and family photos. Notable in the photos, however, was the lack of a clear father figure. He had seen the man in an old wedding photo hung in the main hall, making it clear where Alejandra had gained most of her sharper, more intelligent facial features while her fairer ones had come from her mother before she had been robbed of the smile from that photograph. Given Dorado's reputation of gang violence, Brian could only assume his lack of presence was likely due to an all too common tragedy like the one that had befallen him the day he arrived in Dorado.

"Just one more way none of this makes sense. She should be happy I took out those scumbags."

Once he had fully crossed the threshold, Alejandra slowly closed the door behind him. In any other set of circumstances, this would cause Brian more unease then he was in now, but he understood and respected her want for privacy here. As she took a seat on her bed. He would have preferred to stand, but he figured it better to be on her level, avoiding any body language that would imply a sense of superiority. In a show of equality without risking an uncomfortably intimate distance, he pulled over the chair by her computer desk and sat down. As she reached for her phone to silence the music, Brian interjected.

"You can leave it, 'Crimson Sunlight"'s kind of fitting here."

Tentatively agreeing with him, she set her phone back down, allowing the somber guitar and quiet vocals to set the tone.

The discomfort was palpable. Several seconds passed in silence as neither knew how to start.

"Why did you come here?", Alejandra interjected.

The break in silence surprised them both.

"I...just thought we should talk about what happened" he explained.

"No, I mean why did you come all this way. It's almost two thousand miles between here San Francisco."

"Uh, Oakland."

"Well, whatever, that's not the point. Why go that far? If this is all about you doing the right thing, why did you have to leave your home and country to do that?"

"I just heard there were a lot of problems here and I wanted to do what I could" Brian answered with perplexed and reluctant honesty.

"But why here? There had to have been plenty of towns full of crime that you passed through, I mean, heck, didn't you say it's really bad back where you're from? Why come here, specifically?"

Brian was unsure how to answer,

"Well, uh, I thought it'd be a good goal, otherwise I'd just be wandering. I don't like staying in one place for too long anyway."

"That doesn't explain anything!" The irritation rising in her voice, "Why come to Mexico at all? A-" Alejandra suddenly paused, reconsidering. A hunger for knowledge and a fear of the suspected answer warred in her mind before the harsher feeling won out. "Are you running from something?"

Brian had been dreading the day when any query surrounding the second most important decision of his life came to light and yet, he did not try to run from it. She had done more than enough to earn more answers for him and he he no reason not to trust her now, even if it was clear she suspected the intentions of his journey were less than pure. Even in the short time they had known each other, he knew her not to be one to betray another's trust easily and even if things somehow went for the worst she would not try to have him kicked back to the curb. Just wise enough not to neglect this intuition, he told her of his less than fine reasoning for leaving his home behind.

"Guess I am. I left because there was nothing for me there. The most I grew in fifteen years was in that punch. It's mainly a symbolic thing, leaving behind the past and all that. Didn't just up and leave, of course, took about two and a half weeks to decide that. And don't worry about my brother, he'll do fine. He ain't like me. He actually has a chance at living normal." Alejandra's face was utterly still, locked in irritation, after his explanation. Brian's, however, was twinging with concern as he tried to decipher her feelings.

"You left...just because you felt like it? Because you just didn't like where you lived?", she asked with growing concern mix with her previous ire, more worried by the second that the darkest of her suspicious may have been true.

"Don't say it like that. If I was gonna do this whole hero thing I had to do it somewhere where I wouldn't get shot or tossed in a ward by my parents."

"But you did get shot. It's the first thing that happened when you got here."

"...I never said it was a good plan," he said with a sardonic grin.

Alejandra said nothing after his misguided attempt at humor, too flabbergasted to even fully absorb all of what he had said before it.

"Well, th-", Brian hastily tried to backpedal before being cut off just as swiftly.

"You can't just live like that...it's insane."

More confused than offended by the accusation, Brian rebutted. "Why, what's so wrong about it?."

More offended than confused by the rebuttal, the baker's daughter continued without a hint of humor in her voice.

"You ran away from home and biked all the way to another coast trying to fight criminals in one of the most crime infested countries in the world and you're telling me you're completely sane? You can't just throw your life away like that, you're family must be terrified for you!"

The little patience left on Brian's face left in an instant with the end of her speech and he began one of his own with an almost threatening tone.

"They don't care. They never even bothered to post about me leaving. Even if I told them not to in that letter I left, they should have cared enough not to listen. It's not like they ever wanted me there anyway, they probably didn't even notice I left. Hell, after the museum, you know what they said? 'What were you thinking?' Not 'Well done', not 'Thank god you're alive', nothing. After that, I started making plans, started delivering to places out of the city, learned how the homeless shelters worked, tried sleeping outside without telling anyone, started picking fights with other street rats. Soon as I felt ready, I left a note with my brother and took the first package that took me out of Oakland and just started wandering from there. Now I just do what I did when we met, world needs heroes and all that, right?"

Deceit was not a field Alejandra had any skill in performing herself, but she was quite adept at seeing it in others and saw none in Brian. She could not truly know his pain, despite how cold her mother may have been to others on occasion, she had given her nothing but love and support, even if it seemed like she was babying her at times. Worse still, was the obvious lack of emotional comprehension that Brian had displayed which Alejandra could only attribute to this poor home life. Regardless of this lack of true understanding, her empathy gave her pause in asking the question she had intended to ask since his last fight had ended. No matter what tragedy may have happened in Brian's life, that didn't excuse him from what she suspected. With hesitant determination, she brought the conversation where she needed it to be from the beginning.

"Right, but that's the problem. I know you had it bad and you're trying to do the right thing, but the way you're doing it..." She sighed deeply as she risked asking the question she planned to ask from the beginning. "Brian...Do you like hurting other people?"

Shocked that it would even be a question, Brian answered with frank confusion.

"Uh, no. Why?"

Conversely, Alejandra was very much shocked that this would be a question.

"You don't know!? You were smiling during that whole fight at El Macho!"

"I was?"

"Yes! It was creepy, you had a grin on your face while you were stabbing that guy!"

"I did?"

It wasn't true regret or self-disgust that he felt, but mere surprise. He very much enjoyed the surge of adrenaline and held the meaning behind each fight up with almost sacred reverence, but the fact that he let that show on his face was something he had never realized.

"Well, you don't have to worry," Brian assured, "It's not a sadism thing. I just like fighting. It's about the rush, not the pain."

Alejandra was nothing short of horrified by how casually he spoke of his taste for violence. "That's not much of a difference; it's still just beating people up for fun."

"How's that not different? It's fun from the action, not the effect. Besides, even if I hated fighting I'd do it anyway. You think I picked up the Doomfist cause I thought it'd be fun?"

There was little more than a hint of venom in Brian's voice then, so little that even he did not notice it. Alejandra however, could hear nothing but it. Even with his supposed higher goals, the poison underneath his breath told of something darker in his motivation. She was determined to know the source of this darkness and let her offense at his tone slip by unnoticed.

"Ok...but you have to realize how crazy this all is. Wandering around beating people up is no way to live."

"Well, why not? It saved your life and probably a few more, definitely gave them what they deserved, so what's the problem?"

"You can't just do that forever. If you keep this up you probably won't even make it to eighteen and even if you do, there's not much else you'll be able to do. You need to have a real plan. You can't just gun it now and expect everything to be fine forever."

"Look, what does it matter? I'll do what I can to help everyone on the road or die trying. I'm fine with that, why aren't you?"

Alejandra was something beyond disturbed by this, despite his noble goals and heroic ambitions, a deep-seated nihilism still clouded his soul. The cause of this almost assuredly came from some aspect of his parental issues, but she doubted that he would respond well to any direct questioning. Besides, how it happened was not as important as making sure it would not continue until the end he thought he was prepared for came. Brian believed that the debt between the two of them was already paid, but Alejandra sought more than that. They had saved each other in action, but she wanted to save him in spirit, just as he had done for her. "It's what a hero would do and that's what we both need to be.", she philosophized internally. Despite his belligerence, Alejandra did all she could to hold out hope for him. She did not want to believe the young man who saved her life and showed her the hero she could be was just a psychopath who did the right thing as an excuse to do the wrong thing. Even if he was as she had dreaded, she had to try and pull him toward the right path and help him be the man she thought he was.

"A hero's more than just someone who beats up the bad guys," she finally continued in the softest tone she could manage, "they need to be someone who inspires others to be as great as they are. Kind of like how you inspired me to save you."

The shock from that emotional blow was evident as Brian physically recoiled in his chair. Swallowing hard and audibly, he did his best to defend his position. "Well...It's not like I'm not doing that. You just said so."

"But if it was just for the sake of fighting, that changes things. It's just...barbaric that way. You're better than that." Brian had a hard time processing what that meant, unaccustomed as he was to the concept of self-worth.

As he often did whenever he doubted himself, he returned to his memories of the museum. In particular, he searched for his memories of Tracer, or rather, how she carried herself that day. She had smiled the same way he unknowingly had, she had clearly enjoyed the action, but it was the precise moment that all faded away as soon as she saw him that was important to him now. The joy of battle left her the second she recognized the peril they were in, especially with her Chronal Accelerator, the harness of arcane technology that keeps her bound to reality while allowing her to exercise the post-human abilities her bizarre condition enabled, malfunctioned to the point of barely keeping her tethered to real time. It was not a fear of being lost outside the flow of time once again that had disheartened her or a fear that she would lose her own life without her temporal warping gifts, but a selfless concern for the lives of strangers. Upon reflection and with Alejandra's worries forcing the issue in his mind, Brian came to realize that this was concern he had never felt while on his road. Even when he had come to save her four days ago, her rescue was only an afterthought in his search from battle.

"No, I'm not." Brian nearly said out loud, only stopping to avoid upsetting Alejandra further. It was blatantly obvious, even to him, that she was legitimately concerned with his mental health, worried about him as a person rather than a would-be hero or, as her tone in the past had implied, as an ideal man. The resolve behind her words had given him pause and caused even him to doubt his mission. As much as he wished to believe he was right, there were only so many lies he could tell himself, something was broken inside his soul. The lives of others were secondary to the rush of victory and he had to fix that. Obfuscating that goal, however, was his lack of understanding why he felt this way. It was not as if he lacked empathy, particularly for those victimized by the petty violence of city crime, nor was he vainglorious in the pursuit of the fame heroics brought.

All this accusation, all this introspection, all this doubt; it dug up some deeply buried memories from the recess of Brian's mind. Remembering that time nearly eight years past against his will, he sunk deeper into the emotional canyon this conversation was. "Was I smiling back then too? Is that why they sent me to that psych doctor?".

The question lingered before he stepped out of it to realize how long they had gone on without a word spoken. Alejandra looked more unnerved than ever by the deathly silence, pushing Brian to desperation in search of words.

"I can't just tell her. Can I?...No. Then she'd want me out for sure and...No. What am I thinking? She's not like that. She's just worried I'm nuts and she's right. Wouldn't be right to lie about this."

With a labored and apprehensive sigh, Brian began, part of him almost excited to confront this chapter of his past. "...Okay, I think I know what started all this...When I was eight, I had a bully at school, second-gen Chinese kid in my grade. He liked screwing with the other kids and power tripping if they ever pushed back on him. Mostly he stuck to the Mexican kids since, well, it's an Oakland thing, but he messed with me a lot since I was one of the only kids shorter than him. There's only so many times an eight-year-old can take being called a fag and, well, remember how I said I used to take kickboxing classes? Now that I look back on it, maybe I did go a little overboard, was probably smiling even then too. Not gonna lie, it felt good to win, even if it ended worse for me.

They sent me to a therapist in the end, pulled me out of kickboxing too and had me start taking medicinal. Hated that stuff, made me paranoid, so I just stopped and lied about it, not like my parents actually bothered to check. Long as they had an excuse, they didn't care. More or less gave up back then. Didn't help that Overwatch got shut down not long after, considering how much I used to watch those holovids back then. Still did what I could for my brother, trying to make him not like me, not that he need much for that. Didn't want to do that a lot of the time, since not fighting back got his arm broken by his own bullies. Ended up taking him to the museum to cheer him up, and you know the rest from there. Guess it just felt good to start winning again, so I just went with that feeling, fit well with the whole hero thing...Looks like I ain't doing great at it…"

Alejandra was again speechless as she listened, laser-focused on the would-be hero's tale, her emotions changing with every sentence with the only constant being her concern for him growing indefinitely. Despite her ambivalent feelings, she recognized that this was a massive breakthrough for him and the logical gaps she had found in his motivation suddenly made sense, even if parts of his explanation didn't. It was not that she doubted that he was telling the truth, only what he perceived as the truth, but that was not a hunch she could rely on, given how different their upbringings had been. However, admitting there was a problem was only the first step in solving it and just by looking at him, she could tell that doing so much as that had taken extreme effort on his part. Considering where they had started this talk and where they now found themselves in it, she took his sudden confession well, but with a grain of salt. She doubted anything would get him to stop him from fighting, not that she thought the action itself was the problem, but she was glad he was able to see the issue with how he went about it.

"Thank you for telling me.", Alejandra said after the nearly inaudible sounds of business below them had become truly silent.. "It's not that I want you to stop helping people, but if it's just for the fun of it then it's just...wrong."

"I know…", he sadly admitted. "But what else am I supposed to do? This hero stuff is the only thing that's made me feel like I've had a purpose, I don't like hurting people; I just have to."

He was entirely sincere about every aspect of that statement, and that only made Alejandra more worried for him. In a significantly less than flattering comparison, Alejandra was reminded of Rocky, a dog that once belonged to one of their neighbors down the road. A mutt whose only clear breed was that of an Australian Shepherd. Rocky would always rush straight toward a then eight-year-old Alejandra or any other passerby and bark incessantly at anyone who approached his owners home whenever he was off his leash. But for all his sound and fury, Rocky had never so much as scraped anyone with the teeth he flashed at every opportunity and whenever an angered voice called him back, he would come to heel with an eager smile, failing to see any problem. Brian, it seemed to her, suffered a more extreme yet slightly more aware version of this same train of thought; a loyal dog confused by the lack of a pat on the head for his self issued task.

Tracer never had been one of Alejandra's favored heroes before, but seeing what she had done to Brian, despite the pure intentions in her seven words, made her truly resent the woman.

With all that's been said and all that's been felt by the two, she let the silence hang again before changing the subject. There would be a time and place to push him to be a man as great as she believed him to be, but the first step had been taken, there was no need to risk tripping now.

"...Back before we got to the taco place when we were talking about music, why did you get so upset?"

"Oh, that? I just really hate how a lot a mainstream electronic is just a bunch of upbeat sounds, it's just lazy. Music's supposed to be an art not whatever that garbage is."

"I said I thought he sucked, I just thought that Minuano wasn't completely terrible."

"Not terrible and good are different things, you shouldn't settle for crap."

"I don't, I just thought it was a six out of ten instead of a two out of ten."

"You're still giving it too much credit, you have good taste in music, you shouldn't waste your time with trash. Like, I'll admit when I name-dropped J.D. Cronise I was just trying to look smart by referencing the oldest band I know, but at least it's actually good."

The conversation continued until the last of the sunlight disappeared behind Octobers grey cloud. Over its course, the sorrow in the tones of their voices faded, as if no revelations had come before. They both tried to push past it in the hopes of nothing damaging their friendship, they both even enjoyed the idle talk that followed it, but each of them knew things just would not be the same between them.