The Armourer and the Living Weapon, Chapter 21: past the edge, and away
Hover over French text for English translations. They are a little awkward because span titles apparently disallow apostrophes in some browsers, so I couldn't use contractions.
This chapter contains a scene some readers may find disturbing. I have accordingly put it behind a cut.
[AO3 link]
Oilliphéist laughed and laughed, joyous and free, dancing between gangsters trying, so hard, to play with guns, and failing, so completely, and falling, so quickly. She caught a glimpse of Tracer, across the long great hall, beaming as she shot down two, three, no four, and then she was out, not out as in unconscious, or out, as in out of ammo, but out, as in out of targets, and so was Emily, and they met, as in Russia, the middle of the arena, falling against each other, Tracer shaking, gasping with breathy half-laughs, arms across Emily's shoulders, "Oh," she said, "oh," she gasped, "that, that, that, was brilliant," her pupils blown wide open, her skin hot. "God, that felt good."
The younger assassin laughed, knowing, and put her cool hand on Tracer's forehead, so nice, so perfect. "I knew we'd fight together like this. I knew it." She dropped her hands gently along Lena's neck, pulling her close, and leaned her forehead against her counterpart's, so happy.
"We've," Lena said, gasping a little less, "We've made, a bit of a mess, haven't we, luv?"
"Got that right - and it's wonderful," Emily replied, voice liquid, feeling the teleporter's skin cool under her touch. "Oh, oh, no," Lena replied, "that's wonderful. Keep doin' that."
"Of course!" she said, as Moira's healing orb passed around them, again, small now, almost expended, but no longer needed regardless. "I like how you warm my hands."
Tracer giggled, and touched her collar tab. "Widowmaker, Tracer," she said. "The great hall is cleared. Any sign of the target?"
The shot of the sniper's rifle rang out, slightly faster on comms than in the air, "I believe they are headed towards the helicopter pad. Sadly for them, I have displaced the helicopter's stabiliser bar."
"Nice one. Direction to helipad?"
"Upper floor, east northeast. But they may have more conventional transport elsewhere."
"On it."
The grand stairwell at the end of the great hall diverged across two corridors, and the two weapons looked at each other, nodded, and chose.
"See you on the other side," Tracer quipped, and jinked forward.
-----
"NON! Papa a dit rester ici!" The middle child held his place behind the pillow on the little couch in the now-unsupervised playroom. A guard had been stationed, but was, no longer. "Non!"
"C'est si fort!" the youngest said, sitting next to him, by her own pillow. "Est-ce des omnics?"
"Quelqu'un est dehors," the oldest said. "Cachez-vous!"
-----
Oilliphéist danced through her hallway, silver eyes sparkling, occasionally finding a straggler, picking new ways to shoot each one, wetting her blades when she had the opportunity, keeping her counterparts updated, floating, floating so freely.
I heard that, she thought, and spun around a double-doorway, knocking it open with her back, and spinning, instantly targeting the face, and she jerked, back, grace lost, as the child, no more than ten, at the end of her rifle froze, wide-eyed, too terrified to scream.
A moment. A second moment. A third, and she lowered her Breath, and knelt down in front of the boy. "Oh, oh, oh, no, you weren't supposed to be here," she said, looking around the room, seeing two other children, younger, confused, afraid, hiding fruitlessly behind pillows. "This isn't for you, no, no no, no, this... is no place for children."
She thought, hard, struggling to remember her French. "Viens avec moi. Je vais te ... ah, ah, cacher. Tu seras en sécurité. Oui?"
"Vous... vous... vous êtes bleu!" the terrified boy said, after a moment.
"Oui."
"Es-vous... un omnic?" he stammered, fascinated, reaching towards her face.
"Non. Je suis un dragon, je suis la mort, mais... je ne suis pas là pour toi."
"Un dragon?" he said, taking his hand away, confusion displacing some of the fear.
"Un dragon effrayant. Qui es-tu? Pourquoi es-tu ici?"
"Mon papa est le cuisinier, il nous a amenés au travail aujourd'hui..."
"Viens avec moi, vous tous. TRACER!" she shouted, gunfire having faded away. "TRACER!"
The teleporter appeared at the doorway, and the boy shrieked and ran to hide under the bed. "What is it, lu... oh!" she gasped.
"I spun into the room and there they were, my gun at that one's face... I barely had time not to fire. We have to get them... somewhere else. Anywhere else."
"Right," the teleporter nodded. "'Course. Oh, this is awful." She stopped, and blinked. "I just... realised... I'm a little... surprised you didn't just keep going. What with our mission. And all."
"These are not our mission. Ever," she said, as one the children started to wail, and the third tried to shush him, eyes wide.
"Right. Right." She nodded, relieved. "And you're smart, you said so. Yeah. Good." Tracer darted over to the crying boy. "Shh, shh, ça va," She looked back up to her lover's lover. "Let's get them..."
"I've never killed a child, Tracer. Not ever."
Tracer considered, her head tilting just a little, still trying to soothe the wailing child with her hands, and it not working. "It's not just...?"
"No, it's not." The blue woman glared, partly at her compatriot, but partly at herself, uncertain whether it was always so. But it is so, she thought, and that's what matters. "I'm... a little upset you thought it was. I think."
"Shh shh shh, ça va, ça va." Lena bit her lip, and nodded. "I apologise, luv. I'm sorry, I really am. I ... the way you've described so many things..." She shook her head. "No. I believe you, and I'm sorry. And I'm... really happy I was wrong."
She believes me, Emily thought, smiling, ...and I think I do too. She smiled more widely. "That's better! C'mon. Help me get these kids down to the basement. Should be safe enough, there."
"Right."
They both looked up at the sound of a single rifle shot, followed shortly by a great crashing sound, and the building shook.
"Tracer, Oilliphéist - Moira here. The target is down, and so is her helicopter. Evacuate at once - our work here is complete."
"Also," came Widowmaker's voice, also over comms, "the building is aflame. Get out, now."
"Oilliphéist here, with Tracer - acknowledged. En route." Off comms, she continued, "Or... maybe... another house would be better."
"Yeh," Tracer grinned. "Guess we broke this one." She picked up the smallest of the children, bodily, who squirmed fiercely to no avail. "Venez, les enfants. Nous devons partir - la maison est en feu!"
"Le feu?!" exclaimed the oldest, echoed just later by the middle child.
"Oui. En dehors. Allons-y!"
-----
"You're doing what now?" Tracer demanded, as she sat down, having retreated to a separate room, a private washroom attached to the Reykjavík hotel's gym.
"Recalling you, effective immediately," Winston repeated, calmly. "We have some new information, and we need to evaluate it before we take any more steps in this project."
"You're - you're not thinking of breaking it off. When we're so close to finishing this. We've done so much."
He shook his head, no. "Not immediately. But it's a possibility, if the new information we have is true. We don't know that it is, but... it's important enough to pause, and consider what we're doing. So we - I - need you to break off the current mission, and return, at once. Please."
She shook her head, frustrated. "It's... it doesn't change anything in this mission. We're already on our way back. But..." She looked up, and off camera. "But... Oilliphéist. Widowmaker. We don't, we don't have an agreement, for after, we haven't worked it out and we're not gettin' separated. We're just not. We..."
What's that glance, he thought. "What... did you just look at? You are alone, aren't you?"
"Yeh, 'course I am, I said I'd find a place..."
"Would you rotate the camera around, to show me? Please?"
...he doesn't trust me, she thought, shocked, and she almost kept it off her face, but couldn't, not quite.
"Lena, I need to know you aren't being coerced. That's all. Turn the camera around, if you can. Please."
"Yeh. Sure," she said, her voice flat. She picked up the padd, and slowly rotated it around the small room. "Think I forgot the code phrase for that, then?"
"No, I don't. But if other people had discovered it, then I couldn't be sure you could use it safely."
"Or... what y'really mean is... if I'd decided not t'use it. And Danielle was here. Or Emily."
"Or Moira," he said, firmly, "most of all."
Tracer snorted, nervously. "I'm not stupid, luv, and Hana's not subtle. Even ignorin'... whatever that was at the bar... I've spotted her watching me. It's not as bad as Angie, but..."
She put the phone down on the counter by the sink, and sat on the commode, lid down, her head in her hands, looking through her fingers. "Fine. Right. What..." she took an uneven breath, "What'dya find out?"
He hesitated. "I'd rather not put that on comms, and besides, like I said - we don't know it's true. It's just that there's enough credibility to it that we...."
"What. Did. You. Find. Out." she demanded, fingers curling, anger fighting with fear in her voice.
He sighed, eyes angled down, at his desk. "We have information suggesting you've been ... changed in more ways than we knew. Angela has some ideas about the methods involved, and we are checking them as quickly as we can. Just to be safe, we need you home."
Oh no, she thought, no, no, no, no, no, fear winning out, for the moment. "How? I don't feel it. How?!"
"Through Moira's revamping of your peripheral nervous system. We have information suggesting it's what she's been working on, these last few years - and what Ogundimu was trying to slow down."
"No," she shook her head, trying to feel it, trying to feel for any of it, and just feeling like herself, like her always self. "I, I, I... I don't believe it. How do you... how'd you get this intel?"
"Gabriel Reyes has come to us, claiming to have been a double-agent this entire time, and..."
"Fucking REAPER?!" she hissed, leaning forward. "One of our targets?! He tried to kill you last year! Have the whole lot of you gone completely raving starkers?!"
"Lena, we found backup storage units, offline since 2069, containing files confirming at least parts of his story. They could not have been hacked, they've been powered down the entire time, and secured."
She stared at him, angry, mystified, not speaking.
"Angela is combing through every scan she's taken, every test she's run, looking for something, anything, to confirm or invalidate his story. We need to bring you home, Lena. For your sake."
"For more tests," she said, ...and another holding cell, she thought, but did not say, a spike of fear running down her spine. Wonder if this one'd be shared too? "Y'ever consider this is you doin' exactly what he wants, exactly right now? That this is his counter-op?"
"Of course we have. But we have to consider the possibility that he's not lying. That he's right."
Her arms dropped to her sides, astonishment flashing across her face. "You, you..." She drew a nervous breath. "You trust Reaper... more than you trust me."
Winston blanched, and took a moment, taking that beat. "Lena?" he asked, quietly. "It's me. No. I don't trust him. But we have a responsibility - to you - to find out. That's all."
How is this happening?! she thought to herself. C'mon. Calm down. Calm down. Ask the right questions. "And what would y'do if y'decided he was right?"
"We'd work as hard as we could, until we could undo whatever she's done. Angela has many of the greatest medical minds in the world at her side. We can fix this."
Fix me, she couldn't not think. "And Widowmaker? And Oilliphéist?"
"That... would depend on them."
But none of it depends on me, she thought, shuddering, her eyes closing, and reopening, gaze flashing across the camera.
"No," she said.
"Lena, please, don't do this..."
"No," she repeated. "Not 'till we've finished this job. Then, then, when everyone has calmed the fuck down and stopped listening to mass murderers who literally blew up Overwatch Geneva and tried to kill everyone left over, then maybe. Maybe."
"Lena? Please. You're my best friend. You always have been. You know that. Please, I'm begging you. Trust me. Come home."
Tracer let out a little heh, bronze eyes half-closed, looking at the floor, thinking, thinking, thinking, and deciding.
"Soon," she said, a compromise with herself, looking back up. "Soon." She nodded. "After this is over, and when you've decided to... start trusting me more than bloody Talon board members again."
"Lena," he swallowed, trying to figure out how this had gone so very wrong, "I'm begging you. I'm here. I won't let anything happen that you don't want to happen. Please, come back, or at least... admit you know what might be happening. Remember what you said about everything being so easy. Please."
She shook her head, firmly, no, resolve helping her feel more herself, more in control. "Not comin' back, luv. Not 'till we're done. After that..." She considered his last words, for just a moment. "After that, we'll talk. Tracer" - she reached out, and picked up her padd - "out."
"Damn," Morrison said from the right corner, as Winston slumped in his chair, the screen in front of him now blank. "That's bad."
"That's one way to put it, yes," the scientist replied. "Did either of you pick up anything from her that wasn't... obvious?"
"No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not that we hadn’t already seen. I guess I can't blame her for reacting to Gabe that way..."
"I didn't think she'd split up their little party, and she didn't," Song noted, from the left corner. "We gotta call the bird wives. We gotta assume this'll go straight to Moira's ears, and she'll know we know, and flip."
"I don't think it will," Winston said. "Not even now. Lena wouldn't've said she'd come back at all - not even later - if she was that far gone." He tapped his chin with his index finger. "She's still herself, I'm sure of it. Stressed and afraid - but still herself."
"Doesn't matter - gotta cover all the approaches, can't get flanked," Hana said, glancing at a notification light on her plugsuit. "New mech's just dropped. Gonna go meet it, do checkout. Winston - you'll call Ange?"
He nodded. "I will."
"I knew this was the wrong game to play," the MEKA pilot muttered as she dashed out of Winston's office.
"That doesn't help, Hana!" Jack called after her, before rubbing his temples and looking back to Winston. "We had to play it. Once we had Dr. Zhou's data, we had no choice."
"I know," Winston said. "But I'm not giving up on Lena. No matter what."
"Understood." He let out a little bit of a heh. "Neither would I."
Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん;
comments at Dreamwidth. Please comment there.