Chapter Text
It is mid-evening by the time Amélie closes up Mes Petites Fleurs, and already winter-dark.
Inside the ballet studio had been pleasantly warm and lively up until her last student’s parent had arrived to take them home, smiling and thankful, and now she is left to marvel at how vacuously quiet such a little studio can feel with just her in it. Alone, she spends several minutes tidying away equipment, sweeping and mopping floors, and gathering her purse and coat to leave. The air outside bites at her fingers and her nose as she locks the front door, pressing her palm to the security touch-pad, and she regrets instantly having forgotten her scarf at home.
She had been rushed this morning, in no small thanks to Gérard, though thinking of her husband brings a smile to her lips – tender and small. She will no doubt be home before him, and plans now what she might make for dinner. There is a butcher’s not far from her ballet studio, and a bakery just beyond it – a sweet after dinner wouldn’t hurt. Gérard will appreciate a steak, she thinks, cooked medium rare and well-seasoned. He’s always home so late; she would have the time to prepare something to remind them both of Annecy.
Tucking her purse beneath her arm, she waits by the roadside until the traffic signal permits her to cross, and then takes a left. The street is bustling around her, the city dwellers finishing for work as she has, now making their way home or on to some destination that Amélie likes to guess at – a friend’s house for dinner, perhaps, or the theatre with family to see a new play.
At the butcher’s, she stands in line behind a woman wearing a large, faux-fur-lined coat, and several rings adorning each finger over her black suede gloves. Amélie tries to imagine where she’ll be going after she’s collected her order – who the leg of lamb is for; family, friends, and neighbours? Oh, but a dinner party would be so droll. Amélie can hardly remember the last time she hosted one. She certainly does not know enough people, in this new city, to invite back to her home for food.
Ahead of her, the woman thanks the butcher, accent thick and familiar. Amélie smiles as she passes, and the woman returns it without hesitation. At least she has this, she muses, a city where strangers will still smile at her on the street, or packed into too-small butcher’s shops, where the chill is almost as pressing as outdoors. It makes it feel just a little more like home, for all she’s missing of it.
She is not long at the butcher’s, but takes her bagged steak in one hand and is ready to half-jog her way into the bakery before closing time, when a flashing billboard catches her eye. The screen’s original advert is interrupted mid-way through, the words BREAKING NEWS coming quick and large where a man advertising a disinfectant product had just been projected. It draws Amélie’s attention, as much as she dislikes to gape in the street, but the news can hardly be new. Even while the city perseveres as though little is changing, the omniwar is an ever-present threat, consuming victims with each day.
That is what she is expecting, at least, a new local crisis, and the billboard delivers.
For seconds, Amélie is left staring at her husband’s masked face. It is a picture she is long familiar with – a snapshot taken of him in full-suit, and often the one shown in general news related to his alter-ego. She blinks several times, and yet her surprise does not clear. But, Gérard—? In just a moment, her heart both stutters through several painful beats, and feels as though it might have stopped. Amélie gasps at the message on the screen, her eyes catching on two phrases that have her fingers releasing around her prized steak.
Assassination attempt. Casualties unknown.
Lena flits into being like a spare-thought – too fast, near-intangible, with little idea of her intended destination until she arrives there.
She’s onto Overwatch’s medical and laboratory floor before security can so much as ask for an I.D., although several scanners pick her up as she flutters through a door – flash her image on too many screens, gives security a half-second of panic before the warning is cleared and their hands shy back away from their harnessed pistols.
“A’right, Winston?” she calls from below his perch, and is behind his shoulder in other leap. “I heard the alarm from downstairs. What’ya looking at?”
Her gaze flits from his computer screens and back towards his face. The expression there has her finally slowing down. Winston looks agitated, although he tries to hide it when he meets her gaze, as though she’s caught him unawares. Before he can conceal the expression again, a weary sigh puffs past his lips, and he turns back to the screen. Lena follows his gaze, her brow drawing taught.
“Is that—?”
“Yes,” Winston confirms.
“Why’s his light flashing?” They stare a moment at Gérard Lacroix’s avatar, the banner surrounding it flashing red and urgent, but still lit. That’s the important thing, Lena notes. Once the light’s out, that’s it – no rewinding time, no second chance. “Winston?”
Before Winston can do more than shake his head in frustrated bafflement, another light begins to flash – this time paired with a minor alarm. The gorilla sighs again, activating a button on his touchscreen in order to answer the call from the front desk security. Behind him, a hand on his shoulder, Lena waits with bated breath.
“Sir, we’ve got a situation down here,” the security officer says, and Lena flashes another concerned look Winston’s way. For his part, Winston does little more than frown.
“Can you handle it?”
“Yes, boss, but it’s about—”
Lena’s ability acts on instinct, by now, has her half across the room before she can hear the end of that statement – before, even, she can hear Winston’s quick call for her to not get herself involved. She isn’t security, no, but how bloody hard can it be compared to what she does in the field? She zips down a corridor of unsuspecting people, shouting an apology at the cup of coffee she almost displaces from somebody’s hand, and is down five flights of stairs before her time-hopping ability winds down into a recharge.
At the inconspicuous reception room, it does not take her more than a quick look to find the disturbance – a woman, so familiar that Lena’s shock doubles before her heart sinks. Of course she’s here. On foot, then, she jogs towards the officer that Amélie Lacroix is all but assaulting in her bid to gain access upstairs.
She approaches hands-raised, a, “whoa, whoa, whoa!” quick out of her mouth before the apparent argument can go much further. The security officer steps back, at her approach, uncertain, while Amélie has much the opposite reaction. Lena is a familiar face that she grasps onto with both tearful eyes, a hand small and shaking at her wrist.
“Please,” she tells her, and Lena is nodding, already, before she’s even had anything asked of her. “You know what’s happening? There’s someone I can talk to? The news is reporting—please. I need to be sure he’s—”
Okay, Lena finishes in her mind, and then her stomach twists. Alive.
“It’s alright,” she tells her, though Amélie’s shaking head tells her that it isn’t, that nothing about this situation is alright. She turns to the security officer, instead, to the one problem that she can actually round-about fix. “This is Gérard’s missus,” Lena explains, “I can vouch for her. I’m gunna take her upstairs to wait, yeah?”
She does not let security object, although she can see that they want to – is sure that they’re tailed until they’re through the door, and the security breach of Amélie’s passing beneath the scanners is wiped clean. Only once they’re boarding an elevator does Lena glance backwards, and while they’re not quite being followed, she can suddenly feel the security cameras on her much keener.
She does not let it put her off. Security can take it up with Winston, if they need to, and she is sure that they will.
The elevator rides in tense silence. Once they reach the appropriate floor, Lena guides them through the door to Winston’s lab, turning only to make sure that Amélie is still trailing behind her. She looks little better than she had at security – composed, perhaps, but her amber eyes are large and anxious. She had removed her hand from Lena’s wrist as they’d set off, and Lena has had to stop herself, several times, from reaching out to her in turn.
She doesn’t know Amélie, exactly. Knows of her, would be more accurate, and she’s never seen her at Overwatch Headquarters before, but for the pictures that Gérard has shown them – holiday snaps, filled with amusing anecdotes, his deep laughter and the smile that would light up his dark eyes despite the inevitable teasing.
In the pictures, Amélie is always smiling, always bright-eyed and clearly smitten. The woman scurrying behind Lena in order to keep up could be someone else entirely. She’d never expected to have Amélie here, not in all of her perfectly coiffed chignon bun glory, and wishes there’d been a better reason for it, than the fear for her husband’s life.
Winston is waiting for them when they arrive.
Lena shouldn’t be surprised about that, and yet she turns suddenly wide-eyed, feels suddenly years younger. She holds herself awkwardly, uncertain what to do with herself, what to say, but for a half-gesture in Amélie’s direction. But it is Amélie who steps forward, her hands closed into fists by either side.
“Gérard,” she says, voice breaking, and Winston looks nervously between the pair of them. But, that’s good, Amélie thinks, it must be good. It gives her hope that she grasps onto with both hands lest it try to fight itself free again. Right now, she’ll take anything but pity – anything but that desperate look on the face of the person who has to inform her that she is no longer married.
A widow, already, she thinks. Ma mère would hardly believe it.
She shakes her head at the thought, at Winston and at Lena both. At the billboard that had brought her here, when she should be at home, preparing dinner, awaiting Gérard’s inevitable return.
“Where is he?”
They put her in a windowless room to wait.
The walls are stark and grey, covered in posters and slogans, and dominated by a too-large couch and armchair. Amélie sits in the centre of the former, her body stiff and slumped forward, eyes glued to a television screen. She’s flicked through thirty-three news channels, already, and yet not one has anything more to add than the hair-raising shots of the aftermath from a fight. There is no talk of a body, at least, and only minor civilian casualties.
But this waiting—it will drive her half-mad.
That not even Gérard’s own people can tell her where he is, how he is, has her nerves fraying at the ends. All this time, he has told her how safe he was, despite the dangers of this job. How well-looked-after he was. The crew—the medics, the support, the defence that was all put in place to make sure that he would come back to her each day, to late dinners and a shower before his exhausted body falls into bed beside her.
She can deal with his haphazard timetable – the never being able to commit to plans for fear of his work sweeping him away halfway through them – but not this. Half an hour might have passed already, and her body aches with it, with exhaustion and fatigue and hunger. Feeling ill with the news images on screen, suddenly, she mutes the television and folds in on herself – both hands to her face.
She could have lost him while standing in line at the butcher’s, while considering beef or pork. She could have been fretting over which dessert her evening palette would prefer while he was looking down the business end of a semi-automatic. What had been the last thing she’d said to him, earlier this morning? Had she even told him how much she loves him?
Guilt comes to her, heavy and confusing, and Amélie takes a breath as she begins unfolding herself from her place on the sofa. She cannot sit like this for a second longer. Slowly, she teases each aching muscle until she can stand straight, and folds her arms around her ribs. Thirty minutes – forty, perhaps – and still no news. Is that good or bad?
Before she can begin to fret anew, the previously empty space to her right warps into a figure, as though the air had simply spat her out, and Amélie’s frayed nerves have her gasping almost straight out of her heels. Lena is at once apologetic, looking at her with those big, brown eyes, palms-forward as though to calm her. Amélie relaxes when she sees her, the scare having allowed her to dispel every note of tension tight within her body, and yet without it holding her up, she suddenly realises just how tired she really is.
“Is there any news?” she asks, and feels the urge to fall to her knees so consuming when Lena gives only a timid shake of her head, that it takes a reserve of willpower that she was unaware she possessed to keep her upright. Recognizing her fatigue, Lena’s apologetic expression turns into a half-pitying smile.
“I know just what you need,” she promises, and beckons Amélie towards the back of the room, where various appliances have been set up.
To call it a kitchen would be an overstatement, although it has everything one would need for a working lunch. Lena goes to the kettle, first, filling it with cold water and putting it on to boil as she locates two clean mugs. Teabags next, before Amélie can speak up, though she will take tea and even be grateful for it, at this point.
She doesn’t have another fight left in her.
“There’s nothing like a good cuppa tea to steel the nerves,” Lena says when she presses the mug into her hands, so hot that Amélie almost drops it in her rush to take the handle. She does not try to sip from it yet, but blows an exhausted sigh over its steaming surface. Before her, her own mug in hand, Lena offers another of those pitying smiles. “Don’t worry,” she tells her, voice soft, “we all know what Gérard’s capable of. He’ll be back here before you know it – I’d bet my left arm on it.”
Amélie stares between her young, hopeful face, to the left arm in question, raised palm-up and on display so as to showcase its worth. She wishes she could manage a smile – a thank you, perhaps, for the tea. Instead, a quiet nod of her head, and Lena’s smile fades.
“Well, then,” she says, and Amélie is given the sudden impression that Lena wouldn’t know what to do with silence, were it ever forced upon her.
“Should it be taking this long?” Amélie asks her. “Shouldn’t he have a way to contact the people here – wouldn’t somebody be with him? He said he’s never asked to fight alone, that there’s a group of you—a team?”
“Oh, sure,” Lena agrees. “Only—well, it’s a little difficult to ring home while you’re getting fired at, you know? Oh, no—” she hastens to add, watching Amélie’s face pale. “No, he isn’t alone. Winston said at least four of ‘em are out there. Mercy’s with them, too, so you know he’s in good hands. Communication’s down, but we know they’re sending up a signal from somewhere. We’ve just gotta wait until they get back.”
Amélie huffs a sigh, looking down at the tea that she does not want. When she lifts her head again, Lena looks expectant, hopeful, as though waiting for Amélie to show a sign of having heard her pep talk and taken her words on board. And oh, but she wishes she could. She closes her eyes a moment, curses quietly in her native language, and then forces her mouth into a small smile.
“I cannot help but think the worst.”
Lena’s face drops again, so emotive that Amélie is half-certain she could name every new expression, and then she’s stepping forward, a hand to Amélie’s arm, the soft press of her fingers in what she thinks is supposed to be a reassuring squeeze. That smile comes to Lena’s lips, again, but gentler now – no longer pitying.
“We take care of our own here, alright? Any one of us would do all they could to keep another on their feet. That’s like family.”
She’d meant to inspire hope, Amélie thinks, and yet she finds herself feeling suddenly cold – feeling suddenly very, very alone. It’s a selfish thought, but it comes too quickly for her to discard, with a bitterness in her mouth that asks how it’s right that Gérard should have family, while she struggles even to make friends among the parents whose children she teaches.
She discards the thoughts as quickly as they come, and then nods her head, accepts Lena’s words for the truth that she’s sure Lena believes in. Distressed, she turns her attention back to her cup of tea. Her first sip is far too milky, unsweetened as Lena prefers it, and burning so hot still that she feels its progress right down to the bottom of her stomach.
Like family, she hears again, and wonders why Gérard has never used that term to describe his work friends to her before.
Before she can properly respond, a noise from the lab draws her attention. Lena’s gaze darts towards the door before Winston can arrive within its frame, his large eyes fixing on Amélie, and with a strange smile on his lips – but Amélie knows what that means. He hardly needs to speak before she’s gasping and following after him, demoting her still-hot tea to the nearest surface.
They arrive back in a calamity of unfamiliar voices.
Amélie watches their approach in slow motion, her heart thud-thud-thudding inside her chest, hands clenched by either side. It’s not until she sees him among the small crowd of Overwatch operatives that she can finally catch her breath. He cuts a striking figure in his armoured suit, his skin dark against its silver plating, his face as soft and round as it was in his youth. Seeing him, alive, unharmed, feels like breathing for the first time since she’d stopped before that billboard advertisement.
Gérard is slow to notice her, his attention on the mask between his hands, fingers picking at a part of the plating that has come loose. He nods, sparingly, to the woman following half a step behind him, speaking animatedly while she scratches off notes on her clipboard.
Amélie hears the tail end of what she’s saying, a take two and call me in the morning, without once looking up from her writing. She continues on for half a step too long, pauses just in time to notice the almost-stranger in the lab, and then pivots back towards the place where Gérard has stopped, mid-step, a knowing smile at her lips.
“Amélie?”
For a moment, he’s all concern. She’s never turned up at his work before, nor had he expected security to let her through but in case of an emergency. In the three long strides that it takes for him to reach her, he is half-expecting her to tell him of some awful accident that she’s played witness to, or barely escaped from – is already subconsciously checking her body for injuries. It’s only when his gaze returns to her face, to the pressed-thin lips and the wobble that she can’t quite keep from her chin, that he realises she’s there for him.
“Oh, Amélie,” he sighs, taking her in his arms, but Amélie does not let herself be held for long. She presses up on tip-toes, wraps both arms tight around his shoulders, and squeezes him so tightly that he winces. She draws back instantly, a soft noise coming from her mouth, as she just now realises how one of his shoulders hangs awkwardly lower than the other.
“You’re hurt,” she tells him in their native language – quietly, just for him. Gérard responds in kind.
“It was dislocated, nothing serious.”
She shakes her head at that, perceiving the lie. Assassination attempt, the billboard had said, and yet here he is, still in one piece, a head taller than her and smiling as though he can hide the horror that he’s just witnessed behind the whites of his pearly teeth. Her attention falls suddenly to the mask in his hand, the chipped armour that feels strangely singed when she touches a finger to it. When she turns back to Gérard for an explanation, his expression turns tight with concern. They will talk about this properly, that look says, but later – later.
“I could have lost you tonight,” she realises aloud.
Gérard’s hand on the small of her back presses her closer, her chest to his, until the thick of her perfume is cleansing the stink of gunpowder and war from his nostrils. He breathes her in like a drowning man gasps for air, his lips tender to the top of her head, pressing one long, lingering kiss to her hairline. He pulls back only to see her face.
“Amélie,” he tells her, “nothing out there could keep me from coming home to you.”
“Don’t— please.”
She tries to lower her face again, but his fingers catch her chin.
“Nothing,” he promises, and worst of all, is that she’s sure he believes it.
Having come so close to proving him wrong tonight, she cannot stand to argue. Another day, she will tell him not to give her promises that he cannot keep. For now, she wraps her arms around his middle, and closes her eyes when he presses his lips to hers.
Ahead of them, lingering behind all those who have left the lab in order to give the pair a modicum of privacy, Lena waits in an open doorway. She’s close enough to hear their dulcet conversation, the I bought you steak for dinner, but I dropped it on the ground that she cannot translate, but which brings laughter quick and warm from Gérard’s smiling mouth. Amélie looks indignant before she cannot help but join in, hand swatting at his armoured chest.
In five years, Amélie will have all but forgotten this moment.
Inside Lena’s chest, her heart thumps uncomfortably hard, driving blood through her veins quickly enough to give her a rush. She feels suddenly dizzy, thinks she needs to sit down, and yet she cannot tear her eyes away from the brimming, tearful smile on Amélie’s face. She is relief-softened and so bright that it leaves Lena dazed from staring.
She will wonder, those five years from now, if it’s a symptom of her condition that had her waiting here to watch. If it was her ability to be present in time itself, whenever that time is, that made her commit to memory the way that Amélie’s eyes alight when she laughs, while she still could.
Five years from now, she will wonder if she’s always known, even back then, just how much she’ll miss seeing this smile on Amélie’s face when it has all but disappeared.