On Sundays, Winston watches the ocean. He has a favorite cove among the few on the Watchpoint, where the gulls are quieter than anywhere else on the island and the waves seem to reflect the setting sun with a slightly more settling palate of orange. Every now and then, he sees a ship on the horizon, a yacht or a tanker or a small sailboat on its way to Sicily or France, and in between the breaths of the sea, he imagines himself on its deck, bound for anywhere else but here.
The Mediterranean can be a fickle mistress. Sometimes, she covers herself in a grey veil, and her ebbs and flows take an edge as her wind stings those that come too close, leaving her shivering company to stew in the cold of her disdain. Other nights she takes to black, and rages against the dying of the light as she dashes her skies with the flashes and rumbles of a torrential squall. On more than one occasion, here, where not even Athena can hear him, Winston has joined in her anger, leaving all tact and manners behind to scream and beat his chest at God or the dead or Reyes or whoever else might be listening, and for once, to feed his heart and not his mind, to shout why instead of asking how, and to die a little bit each time.
When he first came to Earth, it was a few hundred miles from here where he landed, in the English Channel. That day, the Atlantic was blue, but restless. Apes can't swim, and so it was a long wait, tainted by the smells of sea sickness within the cramped module bobbing in the grey waves, before the first trawler came puttering up to him. When he looked outside to the fishermen that found him, they all jumped and began excitedly talking in French, but when he asked them if they spoke English, they dropped their gaff hooks and lines, and sped back to the Norman coast without him.
The next boat came out with flashing lights, a crew armed with guns and animal control sticks, and more than a few cameras. Winston was happy to get to dry land by any means necessary then, the water bottomless and waiting to swallow him up. He didn't care about the lines around his neck or the prods in his back. He just wanted off of the churning surface that reached up to drag him down, and steal all that he could be.
But today, the sea is calm. The sky is empty. He is drawn to its shores. The horizon is gold and pink and red and orange, and the water softly laps at his feet, the same beautiful colors above as below. He's surrounded by endless indifference, but there is a tranquility in it. A peace, however ironic, settles over him as the hypnotic lapse between the tiniest waves fade into the recesses of his awareness. A memory of Lena, here with him at the same place many years ago, crosses his mind. The sun is in her hair and her smile is slight, her eyes closed as she takes in the warmth of Spain, and her feet kick from her perch on a boulder, the water splashing up gently to try and meet her.
He kicks a rock into the waves, and both the stone and the thought sink into the depths. He's reminded of his place in all of this; surrounded by the world, the sea and the sky with nowhere to go. He's an animal in the zoo, a prisoner in that he cannot escape, and living in a place that is not home. Today, he's on an island, but there was a time when he was his own ship's captain in an armada of warships, able to command the oceans instead of becoming a slave to them, and the world was his to live.
His fleet left with Overwatch, and his own sails abandoned him here, too torn and rent from the gales of war to carry him on. They all still worked to save the world their own way, or went home to their families. Winston only has one option; waiting.
He's always regretted not being able to have a family. He'll have no one to go home to the way the others might. He'll never find a wife or rear children. He's the only one of his kind, neither man nor beast. He was condemned to a lonesome life when he splashed into the Atlantic all those years ago, and it was Overwatch that suspended his curse for a few years. In those years, he did find love, but what could come of it? Some memories? Some regrets? Some fuel for rage filled shouts to the storms at night, with lightning flashing in his eyes and thunder drowning out his roar?
Neither man nor beast, but at times, he is more one than the other.
And so this island is his cage, his cell, his solitary confinement and his exile from everything that could have been. His message is out, and all he can do is wait for them to come. Lena said she would; he hoped Reinhardt would hear too, and come on his own accord. Morrison, and Amari, and McCree. All the captains of all the ships in the grandest armada the world had ever seen would one day come coursing back to him, and the great fleet that saved the world so many times would sail together again. It would never be the same, but at the helm of that frigate is where Winston always felt perfectly at home, and that's all he ever really wanted.
So here he waits, on a silent cove alone with the sea and the sky and Athena and all his memories to keep him company, imagining the day a ship appears on the horizon, and instead of sailing past it charts a course straight for him. And when it gets closer, he sees the silhouettes of his heroes, his friends, his family, on the bow, and when they make harbor in the safety of his port, it's Lena's voice that welcomes him home.
It'll be any day now when they arrive, he thinks to himself as the sun dips into the ocean, and the clear sky is dappled with stars. He's waited for so long, but he'll be homeward bound again soon.
Any day now...