Tracer's body was lean and agile, and while Widowmaker had certainly admired her athleticism and movements, as one warrior respects another in battle, witnessing the agent's form remain in one place for an extended period of time was foreign. Intriguing. Even the slight chill of the transport hanger did not hinder Tracer from working up a sweat lifting battery cells and toolboxes while repairing the shuttle. Yes, Widowmaker knew she was more attentive on the days when the other woman discarded her jacket. A thin tank top beneath the mechanical vest with the glowing center hid little. Her strong shoulders and toned arms, the sweet smell of gasoline, and the constant, almost musical tinkering of metal parts and electrical hums pleased the older woman.
Pleasure. That was new.
She had gone fifteen days without treatment.
The pilot blew her hair out of her face as she inspected a panel. Widowmaker smirked; that was the fourth time this hour. The girl had removed an internal component of the system out into the open, wires crisscrossing madly over the floor. The observer contentedly thought it almost web-like.
A bright spark flew and a loud pop exploded, the sharp sound ripping through the vast hanger.
"Shite!"
A trail of smoke began to ascend from the area where Tracer worked. Widowmaker blinked, and the younger woman was suddenly on the other side of the ship, yanking a massive wire. Another split second brought Tracer speeding back to the electrical grid, rapidly fanning away the smoke.
Once the immediate danger had passed, she turned to look at her companion over her shoulder, teeth flashing in a grin.
"Well…'spose we know which fuse not to use, yeah?"
Widowmaker's lips twitched. "Silly girl."
The Brit laughed, turning to face the woman fully, "So you can smile. It's nice."
Desire. That was new too. But so much more potent.
Widowmaker quickly turned away.
"I expect many laugh at your actions."
Tracer took the teasing in stride, placing her hands on her hips dramatically, "Someone's got to keep spirits up."
The woman sitting on the chair rolled her eyes, but the corners of her mouth still tugged upwards.
After checking up on the wires and inspecting the remaining fuses, Tracer haphazardly threw on her jacket and pushed her goggles up to rest on her head. Her hair slicked back as a result, revealing a streak of grim across her forehead. She grinned as she walked over before collapsing into a nearby chair.
The assassin tried to remind herself this girl before her was an annoyance. An adorable annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
"Another week, I think," the young woman mused happily, rubbing her shoulder, "Once I get the power back, I can get the battery cells integrated. Only enough fuel here to get us through liftoff."
"Only one chance then?"
"All we'll need," she replied with a wink.
"Cocky."
Tracer's voice took on a heavy, artificial French accent "One shot, one kill,"
"Touché."
"Yeah, I liked it better when you said it before the lot of us fell into that museum," she replied almost wistfully, "More intimidating."
Widowmaker tried to understand the playful tone. The thought of dueling and dancing with the Overwatch agent provided the familiar vividness, but that thrill no longer hindered on the possibility of eliminating her. It simply came from the woman herself. Was this a mutual understanding? The uncertainty was irritating.
Before she could further ponder the complexities of her ever-fluctuating new emotional capacity, Tracer quickly stood, shoving her hands in her jacket's pockets.
"Let's take a peek at the security systems. It'll give me something to mull over while I finish the ship," she said as she nodded her head towards the door.
As Widowmaker stood up to leave; however, Tracer walked back towards the ship, plucking an item that rested on top of a toolbox: a touch tablet bearing the Overwatch logo on the screen.
She tucked the device under her arm, returning her hand to her pocket with a smirk. "Athena likely won't help us crack her own security, yeah?"
She hummed as they walked down the hall to the control room and merrily plopped in what was likely the captain's chair when they reached it. Widowmaker took her seat at a nearby worker's station while Tracer fished around the main control panel for the port she needed.
"Rotten cord, where—here we are!"
Tracer snickered with success as she plugged in the tablet, inciting a tired sigh from her partner. The action only made her smile bigger as she turned back to the turn on the device and began to input commands. Over the course of the next few minutes, however, her smile started to fall. Widowmaker watched her as she bit her lip in concentration, fingers gliding across the screen and tapping away.
"Code don't look right. Ugh," she grunted, slouching in her chair, "Ship computers' usually look different than this. 'Universal language' my arse."
As she continued to scroll through, a churning sensation began to grow in her stomach. Her past experience was limited to changing other pilots' codenames to something inappropriate or removing safety features on certain transports so she could really fly them. This was a level of hacking way beyond her.
"Security programing is tip top."
The mission would fail. Overwatch would be eliminated and it would be all her—
"Perhaps changing your clearance would be easier, no?"
The agent paused, slowly turning to look at the speaker.
"Overriding a single number on an agent's profile rather than fighting the whole security system. Very clever."
Her smile was back in full force. She immediately went back to the screen to try the new approach.
An annoyance. An annoyance. An annoyance.
Widowmaker got up to leave as the young woman tapped away at the tablet. Needing a moment away from the pilot's smile was perhaps one reason for her brief absence, but she did return with a handful of protein bars. Her growing appetite in the past few days had begun to rival even Tracer's, and she now spent the late afternoons experimenting with what food they had and cooking dinners.
She noted all the flavors of the bars before selecting one; Tracer grabbed one without looking away from the tablet, ripping away the plastic, and shoving it in her face. Her companion shook her head before carefully removing the wrapper of her own choice.
Besides the occasional grumbling and muttered curses, the room stayed fairly quiet while one worked and the other perused her form, noting the small characteristics that she suddenly found fascinating. The earring in her cartridge. The pattern of freckles across her cheeks. Widowmaker could not see her eyes, and she thought this was a waste of one of the few times Tracer removed her goggles.
Disappointment. Another new feeling, among so many others. Guilt for staring. Wanting to know more. Irritation at her own lack of focus. Terror. Need.
Tracer's form suddenly hopped up from her seat, jumping Widowmaker from her daze.
"I need a break. Let's check back in on our girl."
Our.
And so back they went.
The return to the transport wing was anti-climactic, and the Overwatch agent focused on smaller aspects of the repair, plopping herself down on the ground next to the other woman's chair to tinker away. Widowmaker again observed; Tracer looked so content to sit on the floor of the wing, legs crossed, unscrewing some metallic box that performed some unknown task she could never guess.
She wanted to know more.
"Where does one learn to hack a computer?" she asked smoothly.
Tracer's eyes flickered up from her work. "Probably the same place an assassin learns to cook, hm?
Widowmaker snorted before sarcastically replying, "Perhaps you were born with it, along with the talent of repairing spacecraft?"
"Mhm. And don't forget being an ace pilot."
Her signature smirk complimented her confidence, but Widowmaker sensed the subtle evasion.
"I doubt either of those skills were self-taught or a matter of predestination."
Tracer's eyes twinkled deviously as she looked up again. "You're awfully curious."
WIdowmaker paused. Wanting was new. Identifying the reasoning for something as irrational as an emotion was just as, if not more, peculiar as the emotion itself.
"My current existence and skillset was determined for me by a particular group of men with particular needs. I am interested in the more organic path."
Tracer held her gaze for a moment before sighing in defeat. She looked back down to the device in her hand and continued working the screws.
"Well, Mum was never around. Dad was always a bit barmy. Pissed at the pub most of the time. He fixed up cars for a living though, and he was great at that. Mostly bangers, but made 'em run better," she explained, removing the casing from the cube in her hand, "I knew my way under a bonnet and how to drive by the time I was twelve. Sort of translated to other things. If I fly it, makes sense to be able to fix it, don't it?" Tracer glanced up with a shrug.
Widowmaker's gaze slid down to the glowing circle at the center of the Brit's chest.
"Creating a device that manipulates time seems beyond the realm of standard aircraft."
"I'm not that good. Winston's work, this," she stated simply with a gesture towards her vest, staring intently at the interior of the box.
"What did you do to receive the honor of wearing it?"
The agent breathed an empty laugh and muttered, "Wouldn't call it an honor."
She plucked a burnt coil from the cube, depositing it on the floor beside her. The silence made her look up at the woman sitting on the chair in front of her. Widowmaker's expression was almost unreadable. But the knitted eyebrows and dark amber eyes made her look back down again.
She set the box on the ground, wiping the grime from her hand on the arm of her jacket. Tracer's fingers instinctively rose to gloss over the patch on the sleeve, following the red, blue, and white rings of a circular logo they had long memorized.
She awkwardly cleared her throat while still looking at the floor. "Long story."
Currently, the two women maintained a truce. Tracer felt no reservations helping the Talon agent and even secretly enjoyed the opportunity to get to know her better.
But her friendly nature did not extend to telling an assassin that had held a gun to her head how the machine on her body was the only thing keeping her alive.
A soft voice interrupted her thoughts, "It is your story to tell or not tell."
Tracer looked up, searching for the golden eyes that were starting to feel familiar.
The visor was gone, and openly seeing her whole face was oddly refreshing. Her long mane was still meticulously pulled back, but the stiffness seemed to have dissolved away into a healthier shine. Her legs were crossed casually, and her body was slack against the back of the chair. Tracer tried to respectfully ignore the revealing outfit that no longer seemed to match the gentleness of the eyes looking at her. Not tauntingly seductive, sharp, and cold but attentive and inquisitive.
This wasn't the same woman that had tried to kill her. But could she be trusted?
Tracer took a deep breath.
"Joined the RAF a week after I turned eighteen. The Omnic Crisis was over, but the world still needed saving. If my stomping ground at King's Row was still buggered up, I figured it was worse other places. Was never very good at much besides football and fixing cars."
She picked up the screwdriver and began spinning it in her hands.
"Turns out I was brilliant at flying. Best in my training class. They said I spent more time tracing smoke trails in the sky than I did on the ground. A tracer," she smiled fondly, "Then Overwatch rang me up."
She pointed the screwdriver at Widowmaker and proudly declared, "I was the youngest pilot to ever join. A few months later I was going to fly the first aircraft to travel through time. Me. Some girl from East End that never had more than twenty quid to her name. A hero."
Her excited rant died off, and her grip tightened on the screwdriver as she lowered it to rest on her knee.
"But, well, didn't quite go as planned. The time matrix buggered up. They say the ship disappeared for months, me with it. Then just showed up one day."
She winced as she looked at the wall across the room while she tried to think of how to explain the impossible.
"My body...I don't...I'm not apart of time no more. When I got back, I was never really back. I'd slip away to different times, and I could never exist enough to touch things. To be. Like a ghost," she murmured, placing the tool in her hand on the ground. She curled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them.
"Chronal disassociation is what they call it. Or named it. Probably the only person to ever have it. So that's something," her breathless laugh was hollow, "If I didn't wear the accelerator, who knows where or when I'd be."
Widowmaker slowly crossed her arms, drawing inwards, and leaned forward to almost whisper, "What was it like?"
"Lost in time? Empty. Very...empty. Dreams you can't quite remember when you wake up. There was a serving girl at an estate. Lifetimes ago. Still don't know if she was real or...or me. A part of me? Forgotten in a different time."
Widowmaker tried to hide the shiver that quivered down her spine as Tracer so accurately described the haunting sensation of Amélie's memories. The large hangar stood still in heavy silence.
"There's a song in the RAF," Tracer murmured, eyes glazing over, heavy with melancholy. Then she began to sing:
Through adversities we'll conquer.
Blaze into the stars,
A trail of glory
We'll live on land and sea
'Til victory is won.
Men in blue the skies are winging
In each heart one thought is ringing.
Fight for the right,
God is our might,
We shall be free.
A small tear quickly fell down her cheek as she finished with a sad little gasp. With a sniff, she was trying to force a smile.
"Not all so bad," she pushed on, trying to encourage her voice back to its chipper tone, "I heal up faster. Though Winston's afraid I might not be aging right. Probably rubbish. Been a bit busy to worry about it. I got...I got plenty of time, I guess," she finished with a shaky breath. She stilled nervous fingers that were pulling at the straps of her vest, subconsciously checking it was on.
"Lena?"
Widowmaker said her name with such wonder.
"Yeah?" she answered simply, looking up at the beautiful woman whose eyes went wide.
"Is that your name?"
"Yeah. Talon got some kind of record on me?
"Not with your name," she whispered, gaze dropping to the floor between them.
Tracer's eyebrows wrinkled with confusion before the slow realization set in; the kind French woman from years ago had known her real name.
She offered a sad smile. "Lucky guess then?"
After a beat, she was soon frowning.
"You're crying."
Widowmaker made no sound nor contorted her face in any manner to suggest the act, but a delicate stream had begun its journey down her cheeks. In fact, she appeared surprised at Tracer's comment, her hand slowly rising to touch the unfamiliar wetness. Then a choked sob broke from her lips, and she began to cry in earnest, crippling forward and weeping.
Tracer sat up on her knees from her place on the ground before Widowmaker. She reached up and gently laid her hand on a now trembling arm. The skin beneath her fingers produced a slight chill, but did not sting with intense cold. She could not think of the right words to say, not sure if she had caused this. Her thumb moved back and forth, trying to at least do something to comfort and soothe.
Widowmaker lifted her head with a sniff. Her hand moved to the thick bracer on her forearm, opening a small compartment to produce a familiar case. Tracer recognized it as the case that held the syringe.
"Take it," she gasped desperately, "Take it."
"Ok, ok. Want me to hold on to it?"
Widowmaker nodded through her tears. When a hand enclosed on the container, she closed her eyes as she continued to cry, profound relief now mingling with her sadness. The burden was gone.
Tracer slipped the case into her jacket pocket, and her hand instinctively moved to rest on Widowmaker's knee. Its partner continued to gently rub against periwinkle skin on a toned arm. Before she could even question if this was comforting or irritating to the crying woman, Widowmaker's gloved hand moved to rest on top of her own.
"Désolée, désolée," she murmured, squeezing their fingers together.
Tracer continued to stand beside her as her words dissolved into gasps of grief. The young woman did not embrace her any further, wanting to give her any space she needed. However, based on the death-like grip of Widowmaker's hand on her own, she knew that simply sitting near her was enough for now.
A/N: I promise I'm writing as fast as I can, friends. Please let me know what you think as always - you guys keep me going. Turning up the heat soon ;D