E | Moira/Sombra/Widowmaker | ~95,000 words | Complete
Sombra gets into bed with Talon and realizes that she doesn't want to get out. Moira stands atop the world and waits to fall. The Widowmaker does as she is ordered, until she doesn't.
Preview under cut.
There was a warm mouth kissing the shell of her ear and then a soft whiskey-tinted breath caressing her eardrum.
“What is it you want, Lacroix?”
Like the roll of the timpani or the growing rumble of the brass she felt something inadvisable welling within her. The word grated against her like it always did and always would, the smug way Moira reminded herself and the Widowmaker and the world of the trophy she had won. The name that wasn’t really even Amélie’s at all, just the signifier of a husband who didn’t love her enough to come home and visit.
I AM NOT LACROIX.
Instead her hand gripped onto Moira’s as hard as it could, her fingers digging into the spaces between Moira’s, the veins and tendons bulging as she urged that hand to dig deeper and harder to scratch like it would pierce skin and muscle and bone.
.
Moira pressed more of herself against the wall to roll one stiff calf and stretch it out. One hand she stroked through Amélie’s hair, thin and silky. The other arm, the one holding Amélie, rested on her hip. She couldn’t hear or feel Amélie’s inhales and exhales. She could only trust she was still breathing.
She did not want the morning to come, did not want to let Amélie back out into the world, but she would. She would let her go as she’d let the cat of her childhood out time and again until it simply didn’t return. In the long nights when she missed its presence at the foot of her bed she told herself it was having an adventure, had found something important, was hunting and fat and happy.
It had probably been hit by a car or savaged by a dog. It had probably died slow and painful by the side of the road.
She would never know.
Her hands tightened. The melancholy crept in, a leaden blanket that offered no relief from the cold. Amélie’s body leached all the warmth she could offer. There was nothing comfortable about it, just the awkward confines of the bed and the stiffness of their bodies. She supposed it was not meant to be comfortable.
.
She was jittery. The music wasn’t enough, had never been enough. Sombra reached for the half-empty bottle of gin and wished she’d picked up weed instead, or something stronger. A bitter tablet under the tongue.
Her hardware was defective at its core, and none of the upgrades she’d made could ever really fix that. She wished the old wish that she was an omnic or one of the simpler machines that she commanded so effortlessly. How pleasant to bring sleep about like the flicking of a switch.
She was better as a human, she always told herself, but damn was it hard to believe that when she was sweating and feeling her hands tremble and wanting to just be asleep.
It should have felt better to get her strings wrapped around her latest friend, but it was hard to feel halfway decent when the videos were still playing themselves in her head.
Dogfighting. Who the hell was still dogfighting? She’d thought omnic-baiting had replaced it, but apparently not. Apparently people still liked to watch and listen as the animals they’d raised to die bit and clawed at each other and barked and growled and screamed and bled out.
She didn’t know dog screams could sound so human. She hadn’t wanted to know that.
