Total Recall - Ghosts part 2
Monday, June 5th, 2017 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ossobucorenshai for our Saints Row bosses, because we're huge fucking nerds. The 'verse centers on former Overwatch brats Lena McCarroll and Max Eshkibog, daughters of decorated Blackwatch operatives Maddie McCarroll and Lilah Eshkibog. After their moms are reported killed in action, the girls are sent away to a US Marines boot camp and a Canadian military academy, respectively. The Recall happens when they're about 24-25.Fandom: Overwatch, mostly
Characters in this bit: Lena McCarroll, Ana Amari
Word count: 1608
Rating: Very soft teen for lots of swearing and abandonment issues
Summary: Lena is trying and failing to get comfortable in New Overwatch (TM), and gets her second visit from a ghost.
Also here @ AO3, here @ tumblr.
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The sun is just rising, orange light filling the cracks in the windows of the new Overwatch’s HQ, or more accurately, its hide-out. Likely abandoned since shortly after the Omnic crisis, it’s only marginally worse than the Saints’ base of operations, low-profile and generally low-tech except for the few amenities that Winston has managed to repair or install himself. The old dormitory’s doors don’t lock, and the beds are worse than the granite slab of a mattress she’d had in boot camp. There’s a kitchenette with an unreliable oven and no dishwasher, and the only furniture in the adjacent rec room is Winston’s tire swing and a musty couch with a persistent odor of stale coffee.
And thank fuck for coffee, Lena McCarroll thinks as she reclines on said couch with her mug of (fresh) brew. She’s the only one awake, partially due to a Marines-born habit of rising early, partially because she hasn’t been able to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time since Jack brought her here. It’s given her a chance to learn the others’ schedules, though. Winston keeps hours that are just as irregular, but offset just enough that they don’t have to fight for the coffee machine. Jesse McCree stays up late, sleeps late, and wakes up hungover about half the time. Tracer sleeps a solid eight hours every night and is invariably the brightest-eyed of the whole gang.
Jack Morrison wakes up even earlier than Lena does, but he leaves base for days at a time to go steal more weapons, or summarily execute people, or whatever else he does when he isn’t busy calling her a criminal. Lena does not miss his company.
It isn’t like the old Overwatch at all, really. She isn’t sure what she expected, but it was definitely something more official—more equipped, more purposeful. They seem to have jobs to do, based on what she’s overheard between the others, but nobody has bothered to elaborate. She suspects that Jack has ordered them not to until he’s decided he can trust her.
Maybe subconsciously, she expected something more populated. Even now, even though the building is nothing like the base she grew up on, she expects to find Max sitting up on the kitchen counter reading an instruction manual, or spy Genji and Fareeha practicing with throwing knives in the yard, or turn a corner and run into Gabriel Reyes walking back from the shooting range smelling like propellant, or—or…
She takes a swig of scalding-hot coffee and grits her teeth.
It really isn’t what her return to Overwatch was supposed to be like at all. (But until Jack lets her go on field trips with the rest of the class, she supposes it doesn’t count, anyway.)
Halfway through her second cup, she’s bored enough to consider waking up Jesse and bullying him into a wrestling match, when there’s the sound of a motorcycle pulling up outside. At first she writes it off as Jack coming home early, but no—the engine sound is different, a little louder but fewer cylinders. The sound of it coming to rest on the gravel is lighter, and Lena can’t even hear any footsteps—so, definitely not Jack.
She figures she’s only got a few moments before the doors are blown or battered in, so she grabs her pistol from the coffee table and tucks down, one knee on the floor, the other foot braced on the couch cushions, ready to spring but still hidden from view.
The door opens with a gentle click of the electronic latch, and it swings open quietly. Now, Lena can hear footsteps, but just barely. One person, gait unbalanced.
The door closes.
“Who’s there?” a woman says, guarded, and although it’s deeper and huskier than it used to be, Lena would know the voice and its accent anywhere. The mug slips from her fingers, rolling and clattering to the ground, and now the couch is going to smell even more like stale coffee—
—and Captain Ana Amari strafes slowly around the couch, sidearm aimed with both hands. A sniper rifle is slung over her back, along with a fraying rucksack.
Lena slowly drops her pistol. She must look like an absolute moron, in her tactical crouch on the cushions like when she and Max and Fareeha were kids, building blanket forts and playing soldier. The dumbstruck stream of “okay, holy shit, but what the fuck” coming out of her mouth probably isn’t helping, but this isn’t like what happened to Jack, she was half the globe away when Jack was supposedly killed, but Jack himself broke the news when Ana had died, how she’d been killed covering his escape…
(And now an awful voice in her head starts whispering, if Jack was wrong about Ana, then maybe—maybe—)
Ana has already holstered her gun, as if she doesn’t need the answer to her question. “Lena, is that you?”
“What the fuck,” Lena repeats, slowly standing as if the floor might give way underneath her. “Captain Amari…”
“Please, dear, just call me Ana.” The sniper shrugs the rucksack off of her shoulders and onto the couch (the rifle stays on her back, rather conspicuously as far as Lena is concerned), and takes a long look into Lena’s face. Lena doesn’t get the sense that Ana doesn’t trust her—on the contrary, her eyes are warm and soulful and horribly sad. “Did Winston’s recall reach you? How did you get here?”
“Morrison and I, uh… ran into each other.” She grimaces.
The very corner of Ana’s lips quirks. “Is that so.”
“Yeah, speaking of Morrison…”
“… he and I are both dead,” she finishes. “Or so we let the world believe. Including each other, until very recently.”
“If you were both alive all this time,” Lena asks, and where the same thoughts directed at Jack just make her want to deck him, with Ana it’s different—it hurts like a stab wound, and her voice cracks involuntarily. “Why didn’t anyone come for me? Or for Max?”
Ana’s lips press thin. “Is Maxine not with you?”
Lena doesn’t answer for a long moment, like maybe Ana knows and isn’t telling, because the alternative hurts even worse. “No. I don’t know where she is, she fucking vanished. So why did you—or Jack, or Gabriel, any of you—why did you let this happen?”
“Talon was watching all of us.” Ana’s voice is equal parts calm and stern, and if Lena’s reading her right, too much of both. “Even when they believed that Ana Amari and Jack Morrison were dead, they hunted us. If we had gone to you, either of you, we would have led them right to you.”
“That,” Lena snapped, “is a bullshit excuse if I’ve ever heard one.”
Ana’s overall demeanor doesn’t change, but she hesitates, and there’s a quiet rasp in her throat. “It was true at first,” she sighs, “or it was what we each told ourselves, that you both were safer without us. And then we became so busy, trying to stop Talon or to get revenge…”
“… that you forgot.” Lena waits a moment for Ana to protest, but the older woman only looks away, silent. “You fucking forgot about us. No, yeah, it’s okay, I think I figured that out already.”
Sure, she never wanted to believe it, but even if she had, it’s another thing entirely to have it confirmed by someone she thought she could trust. It makes her eyes burn and her fists clench, and the weight of it breaks whatever stupid sense of familial loyalty has kept her here this long. It’s not too late to go back to the Saints and their vastly superior cash flow—hell, maybe she’ll take Jack’s motorcycle with her, and sell it for parts just to spite him.
“I can’t believe I let Morrison drag me back to this shithole. Don’t know what I fucking expected.” She picks her gun back up and tucks it into her jeans, safety on—and that’s it. She doesn’t need to take anything else that isn’t already on her person. Maybe she should let the others know she’s leaving, but if they couldn’t even be bothered to look for her? Fuck ‘em. They can figure it out on their own.
“You expected better of us, and you were right to.”
—and she stops before she’s halfway to the door. She doesn’t turn back, not yet, but still. Damn it.
“Someone should have been there for you as you grew up, and we took that from you—just as I took it from my own daughter. If you cannot forgive me, I understand. But for the others… I can’t believe it was pure coincidence that Jack found you, Lena. I can only suppose that not everyone forgot about you.”
At first, Lena scoffs, because there’s no way in a thousand years that Jack had any idea she was inside that police van, but… now that she thinks about it, what with everyone else’s reactions to her arrival, it’s funny that Jesse McCree hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised to see her.
Not that it truly makes up for, well, everything, not that she isn’t still furious, but… all right, if it’s true, she can’t just leave without saying goodbye. If Jesse thought it was worth bringing her here, however the fuck he’d managed to orchestrate it, then maybe it was worth giving the new Overwatch a chance.
“Will you share a pot of tea with me, and tell me what I’ve missed?”
Lena takes a deep breath and turns around.
