Chapter 3: Family Reunion

"Another successful test, although pretty brief. Lena appeared for three seconds exactly, just like the day before. I think there may be an important pattern there. I should also note the oddity in her patterns. No conclusion yet, but I don't think she's a part of our flow of time…"

The Oxton Retrieval Project reports, Winston, Day 105, Page 1

Tesla's heart pounded hard enough to burst through his chest.

He left her.

Given, he hardly knew the woman. They had met only thirty minutes ago, but he left her. A tinge of guilt swirled up inside of him as he slowed towards the landing below, the image of her face burned into his mind as he did. While he yelled and tried to throw every ounce of disgust at her before the jump, that face of her remained resolute and frozen, not a spark of emotion leaking through.

He came to a near stop right before his feet touched the ground, and then just stood there a moment, feeling his blood rushing in his ears, breathing heavily. He could fly back up. It would only take a minute and he could save her from the people that wanted her for whatever reason.

No. He couldn't let himself do that. She was Overwatch, and they deserved his hate.

He pounded off towards his vehicle, a black, sleek hover car modeled to mimic a two thousand fifteen mustang. As he approached, the door slid open and he slammed into the passenger's seat. An awkwardly tall omnic sat at the wheel, hunched over from its sky scraping proportions.

"Ah, sire!" the omnic sighed pleasantly as though it had just been spared the electric chair. "I'm glad to see you are well!"

"I'm glad to see you got my message," he shot back, rather harshly. He regretted it. Blenn was a dear companion to him, one of his only friends that he could think of besides the minister. Despite Tesla's recurring bad attitude, the robot stuck with him throughout his whole life. Given the omnic had been employed by the family as a servant, but he could leave at any time. No one required him to be there.

"Sorry," Tesla said finally, heaving a deep sigh, "It's been a rough day. Can we go?"

Strangely, the omnic did that twitch of surprise it always did when it was, well, surprised. Tesla eyed him and frowned. "Is that a problem?"

"No, no, no! Of course not, sire! I just thought we might be expecting, uh-," the robot tapped its chin in pondering, and then shrugged innocently. "I supposed nothing, shall we go?"

Tesla ground his teeth. The omnic was hiding something, the clues blaring out from the sudden jerky notions of its head, the tapping fingers againat the wheel, and a synthetic cough to top it all off. Frankly, the blasted omnic couldn't lie. No matter how hard Tesla tried to train him too. Normally he would grind the truth out of Blenn, but he wasn't in the mood. They needed to go, so he waved an apathetic hand at the omnic and pointed towards the window.

"Let's just go."

The omnic nodded, and off they went.

The card ride was silent, and Tesla tried to keep his teeth from smashing into dust. The day hadn't gone so well. He created the battery he always wanted and it terrified him. He abandoned a nobody and it guilted him. And his robot was lying about something and he didn't give a rat's tail. Today, Tesla felt like anything but Tesla. He felt like a child in a man's body. Old emotion came gurgling up, ones he wanted to shove out, including thoughts of her.

He let out a sigh and bumped his head against the window, Lena's face staring at him in his mind as he did. They probably had her by now, dragging her to the detainment facility where she could be kept safe and contained.

The vehicle swerved off the road and floated near a small, non-important corner of the street. Blenn then parked the car, putting on the break, and sat back. Tesla frowned at him.

"Why are we stopped?"

Blenn tapped his chin again, clanking quietly. "I er-, well, I thought the view was nice," he said, pointing at the beige wall of a nearby building.

Tesla groaned, "Blenn, I'm not in the mood today. Stop tapping your chin and tell me what you're trying to lie about."

"I'm not certain what you're on about, sire, I'm not lying about anything."

"Well you're definitely hiding something, so spit it out."

"Sire," the robot said with a tone so courteous that Tesla's blood nearly curdled, "I'm merely here to pick up a passenger."

"Passenger? Who?"

"I promised I wouldn't say."

Tesla stared at him. He said very slowly, "Did you now?"

Blenn nodded.

"Who is it, Blenn. Tell me."

The Omnic shook his head.

"Blenn."

"Sire, you can say my name as many times as you wish, I will no-,"

The back door opened and someone slipped inside. Tesla's nerves jerked and he whipped around, throwing a fist up ready to defend himself against a petit, masked woman sitting in the back. She reached up and slipped off the mask.

"Aunty?" Tesla blurted at Ana, the world renowned sniper and former overwatch agent.

The older woman smiled. "How are you doing, Tessy?"

He felt too kerfuffled to feel embarrassed at the old nickname.

The woman chuckled softly, "Don't act so surprised. You know I try to stop in regularly."

"But you're supposed to be-," he paused, looking around the street outside the car, "Well, dead. Oasis isn't the best place to do that."

Ana waved a dismissive hand, "Their systems aren't as impressive as they like to believe. I've been here for a few weeks, in fact." She leaned forward slightly, "The teas here are amazing."

Tesla felt as though something lifted from his shoulders at the sight of her. Aunty Ana had showed up just when he needed it. He hadn't seen her in a few years, even though he always had the sneaking suspicion that she was dropping by without his knowing. Often whenever he found an empty teacup in his room, which was pretty odd since he never drank tea and Blenn's an omnic.

Ana technically wasn't his aunt, or by any other definition. By law, she was his God Mother, but as a kid, for whatever reason, he always thought she was his aunt and they let him believe it well into his early teenage years. The nickname never left.

Her death had been a secret to everyone except one, namely his mother. She had installed Ana's first cybernetic eye and helped clean up the wound after the incident. Only his mother was supposed to know, not even his father had known, but Tesla had managed to stumble across the surgery to clean up her wounded eye. Not terribly hard to do since they decided to perform the operation in the basement of their home. Since then, a peep of it had never left his mouth and he hadn't seen her since.

"Mom asked you to check in, didn't she?" he asked.

Her smile turned slightly mischievous, "Guilty as charged. Now then, where is Tracer?"

Tesla frowned and out of the corner of his eye Blenn did that shocked flinch again. All the pieces in his mind fell into place.

"Who's Tracer?" he asked carefully.

"The woman who broke through your window. I saw it with mine own eye. Blenn?"

Blenn hesitated and then shook its head.

She slowly turned her gaze back to Tesla. "Where is she?"

He gritted his teeth. He should have known Ana would somehow be involved. "I left her. Guards were looking for her, they showed up, and though that was my chance to-" he coughed as a hand smacked him in the back of the head. It was so fast that he hadn't even seen Ana move. "What was that for?" She smacked him again.

"Blenn, take us back to the tower," she said calmly and put her seatbelt on. "Tesla, I'm very disappointed."

"Disappointed? You show up out of the blue after years without seeing you and you have the audacity to say that? She's Overwatch! And you know what that means to me."

She leveled an eye at him, "I was Overwatch, if memory serves you well enough to remember."

"That's different. You left before everything went down with the civil war and all the garbage involved there."

She stared at him moment with that single eye gaze that always shut him up, whether he wanted to or not. "That woman has saved more lives than you've spent days wasting away in that tower, Tesla."

The words slit through his chest like a sharp blade and the guilt surfaced up in full force. Ana had made a point he didn't want to admit to himself. He had done the wrong thing, and he knew it. Whether he liked it or not, those agents were heroes, unlike him. A part of him wanted to yell back, but the tightness in his chest muffled the feeling. He almost felt numb.

That still didn't change what they did. Leaving Lena, or Tracer, was wrong, he'll accept that, but some part of him still thought she and every last surviving Agent of Overwatch deserved to be in jail. Ana excluded.

He shoved the thoughts away and noticed the car satl planted on the ground, unmoving. "Well? Are we going?" he said, shooting a look to the omnic.

Blenn looked at him, and then at Ana.

"Put on your seatbelt, Tessy," she said.

Tesla grunted, slipped on the seat belt and threw his arms up. "Now?" He hated how whiny he was sounding.

And they were off back to the tower to clean up a serious mess. This was not, he decided, one of his better days.

A cold, icy mountain lumbered in the distance. It waved gently, as though Tracer were looking at it through water. Somehow, she knew that place. It called to her from somewhere she couldn't quite remember.

She coughed as a wad of spit spilled out of her mouth. Darkness swallowed her vision and slowly cleared from her eyes as she blinked away the odd image of the mountain in her dreams.

It was cold, and she was shivering, and she hated shivering. Her shoulders ached and it didn't take long to figure out why. Some bloke decided to tie her hands up towards the wall behind her and her feet to the floor just below that. She was leaning forward awkwardly, hanging by her wrists. A sharp, aching pain ran down to her shoulders were the angle was making quick work on her skin and joints.

"Oy, anyone got a pack of hot rice? I got a sore something fierce on my back."

There was no reply. She couldn't believe she had the audacity to get tied up twice in one day.

A single light overhead lit her and the floor just below her. As far as she could tell, she was sitting on the edge of a world made of infinite darkness.

The events of how she got here were foggy to say the least. There was a lot of gun shots, a lot of rewinds and zipping through the air. She downed at least fifty guards before they finally got her. Or at least twenty guards. Or five. But no doubt that whatever it was that happened, it was quite heroic and they were all very impressed by it. She didn't have to be conscious to know that.

The memory stirred the image of Tesla back to mind. The man stood on the rail of the balcony, glaring at her with eyes fiercer and with more fiery than she had seen in years. That kind of look came from a lot of bad history of some sort. Even though she didn't know the guy, it still stung just a bit. A lot of people have given her a similar glares over the years, ever since Overwatch shut down, but his were straight up laserbeams. She wondered what could have brewed such a passionate feeling of hate.

Her heart stopped as her brain caught up to the moment for the first time. She wore a blue jumpsuit with white highlights, not her own clothing. That meant someone had taken Winston's memory device with the information about the Slipstream; those jerks. When she finally met these people, she'd give them a right talking to with a blustering bunch of slangs they couldn't hope understand, unless they were british.

A clacking noise sounded from within the shadows. A beam of light split through and two silhouetted figures made their way, sauntering towards her with precisely calculated steps and straight back postures. They walked with such determination and exactness that she knew immediately who they were, and she groaned tiredly.

"Evil scientists," she sighed as they walked up to her. Their faces did come into view, but it didn't give a lick of help to her. Dorky google covered half their faces, obscuring their features. They muttered to themselves, pointing at a tablet the lady one held. She indicated the restraints and then hit a knob. Immediately the strain in her hands eased as the binding let her finally rest after what must have been hours of hanging. The restraints lowered enough that she could rest her arms at her sides. That was a right mistake on their part.

She rewound immediately, time sliding her back up and freeing her hands. She threw her hand out to grab the first scientist and then screamed as it collided with a forcefield. Hot flashes of pain arched through her wrist and elbow.

Blimey she still had a good arm for hitting. Shocker that forcefield held up.

"Sorry, we should have warned you about the shield!" The science lady said, who was now holding a hand too her mouth.

"Where am I? One second I was on a balcony like thing and now I'm here," Tracer said, her tongue feeling fat in her mouth. They must have put her on some strong drugs. Smart. Her body, for unknown reasons, had the capacity to process toxins at an accelerated rate. They probably dumped a horse's portion or two into her body just to keep her asleep.

She shook her groggy head, and rewound a little bit more just to heal the broken hand.

"This facility doesn't technically have a name, not on any official record." The man said, who was still tapping away at some kind of tablet.

"Great, so I get to name it then? I was thinking trashcan, or bubbles if doesn't sound flashy enough."

The lady scientist chuckled. The man scientist didn't. What a punts.

"So what's on the menu today. Poking, prodding, and probing most likely? If we could fast forward to the part where I break out, that'd be great."

"We're not going to harm you, Lena Oxton. You're too valuable to us," the man said, "But we do need answers, and that may require certain uncomfortable," he paused, "sensations."

Tracer rolled her eyes. She had felt this day might come. Being under the proverbial microscope was an inevitability considering she sort of didn't play well with the laws of time and space like most folk did. But in the history of her abilities, no one had the audacity to capture her, mainly because she had an army of super heroes at her back to bail her out as needed.

Then again, that super hero agency was slow booting. There were probably only a handful who had even responded to Winston's call. They didn't know where they were and most, if not all, were currently preoccupied with the second omnic crisis. Blimey, she might be in actual trouble for once. But she didn't know the full breadth of her powers, so no sense in giving up now.

"Right, so I can expect pain, nothing fancy there. What's the plan?"

The scientist placed the tablet on the table and gestured to his female partner.

She cleared her throat. "We've tried reproducing your condition hundreds of times, and to no avail. You're quite the unique coincidence."

"Thank you."

"However, we have a deadline and, well, our sponsor wants us to speed things up, which is why you're here."

She rolled her eyes again, "typical. You know, the smartest scientist in the world tried to do this very thing and he had me as a volunteer at the time. If he couldn't figure it out, what makes you think you can?"

The woman looked at the man and he didn't even bother to look at Tracer as he said it. "Morals."

She gulped.

The minister stared wide eyed at Tesla. "Confound it, boy! You know what kind of liability that was! She's a fugitive." The minister threw his arms out wildly in frustration like some crazed clown. "Your room is covered with members of the team of investigation. They're going to recreate everything from the data they gather and find out exactly what happened."

Or they would certainly try, Tesla thought. His room was designed to counteract every single one of their scans and devices. The most they'll be able to identify is that he was in the room with Tracer, and, yeah, that was about it.

"Listen, I know, Minister, and I'm sorry," though he really wasn't, "but I need to talk to her."

The minister gave a puff of frustrated breath, clearly exasperated that Tesla wasn't listening. They stood back in his office, alone. The others stood outside where the minister wouldn't pry too deeply into Ana's identity which would be a whole new can of worms.

"Well how can I grant you that?" the man muttered before sitting back in his chair. "I'm not over that department. They took her who knows where and that's that."

Tesla frowned, "They didn't take her to the detention center?"

The minister paused and then slowly shook his head. "No, I suppose they didn't."

"Where else could they take her? That's quite literally the only place they could take her legally."

The minister rushed to his feet and shoved a finger at him. "This is the last straw, Tesla. You've failed your experiments. You've failed this department. And you've failed ME. I've put my neck on the line for you countless time. Now drop the matter this instant and report to the team of investigation, answer all their question."

"Minister, I-,"

"No!" the minister yelled, his voice shaking Tesla to the core. The minister had never yelled before, even at the worst of times. "Get out of my sight, and do as I say."

Tesla lingered only a moment before turning around and leaving the room. He hesitated outside the door, the weight of everything briefly slamming against him. His life was ruined. His room would be stripped apart. The only minister backing him in his research would likely drop him after all these years. And to top it all off, he didn't feel comfortable in oasis anymore. Originally he had planned to come back after keeping his device safely hidden and then continue the research and figure out why it worked at all. Now he figured that would never happen.

His teeth tightened together. None of this would have happened if that Overwatch agent hadn't broken through his window.

He flinched. A subtle, dull ache began to form in his knees and elbows, breaking him from his spat of internal frustration. The pains came always came after a few days without a recharge. At some point, it would begin to ache in his knuckles, wrists, and neck, like something wrapping around each joint and slowly tightening. He could probably make it a few more days before the main became unbearable.

The door gently shut behind him, knocking him from his thoughts. Blenn and Ana emerged from behind a pillar.

"Are you alright?" Ana said, lightly grabbing his elbow, "you're pale."

He cleared his dry throat, "I'm fine," he said through a cracking voice, "just a little shell shocked. The minister is not happy with me, a running trend with a lot of people recently," he gave what he thought was a laugh, but it sounded like a gurgle sigh.

He cleared his throat. "But he won't help us, I don't even know if he can. All I know is that she wasn't brought to the detention center."

"I was afraid of that," Ana said, her accent becoming a little thicker. Something that often happened, he noticed, when she was nervous. Nothing phased that woman, or apparently almost nothing, so he couldn't help but feel a little nervous himself.

"I believe this is quite intentional," she said at last. "That explosion from earlier, the crashing ship, felt very staged. I reached out to a contact from Overwatch and learned that Tracer had intentionally let herself be captured. I'm worried that, somehow, someone knew that Tracer would be captured and which ship she would be attempting to get aboard."

"Alright, so she was on the ship that exploded and ended up in my room, nearly killing me in the process. But why? Why my room and why Oasis?"

She shrugged, "honestly, I don't have all the answers. I have confidence that your room was an accident. Too hard to predict. But they most likely wanted her to be in Oasis for various reasons," she paused, "I'm not sure for what. But if it is intentional, then it means there's another force at play here outside of Talon. We need to be careful."

Tesla nodded, his mind spinning. He had no idea who Talon was, but it didn't sound great. Just a few days ago he was punching numbers, running calculations, and playing with the laws of physics in his spare time, and now he was on a rescue mission for someone who needed rescuing because of him. This wasn't his shindig, not anymore. He wanted just one thing, and that was to be out of this city and away from everything for a while.

"So, do you think you can find her?" Tesla asked.

Her lips curled into a smile he hadn't seen in some time. One of intimate confidence. "Dear, we know with a little teamwork anything can happen."