Chapter Text
The cloister bakes itself into the pink-rocked planet in guilt, as though it know what it is and is ashamed. There is no life, no duty here as it lies dormant and forgotten, but you’re no fool. You take your personal craft in with cloaks on, and kill it far from sight.
Looks can be deceiving. You hope that in this case, they are.
You flashstep close—the front door is obvious, but it’s also the only way in. The Jade cloister is built into the mountainside; privacy of the upmost. No one knows what exactly off-world jades do, why they are siphoned off and bundled away like this, but whatever the secret it has kept the centuries. And if that secrecy builds places where remoteness and hostile solar flares keep their charges from escaping? All the better.
You shiver. Its been sweeps but it still pains you to think they took her here—or somewhere like here, but you hope, you hope this time it truly is here—when she was so vibrant. This places kills trolls like her. Takes what Emilly who she was and strips it for parts.
But this time it has to be the right place. It doesn’t matter how many empty holes you’ve tripped over in the sweeps of your search, you will find her again.
The doorway is damp. Not sealed, just a troll-sized hole carved in the stone. Groundwater then; this place may even have supported life, if the jades required it to. You are frozen at the threshold, between the rosy desert behind and the life-giving pit below, wondering how the moisture hasn’t instantly dissipate in the thin atmosphere, when another of the jade’s marvels come to life.
Namely, an automatic security drone rising from the sand behind you, and knocking gravel from its rifle.
As a wriggler, it was made clear to you that other trolls talked to their lusii, and it should not have been your fault that you took this entirely literally.
Why wouldn’t Winston talk to you? He raised you, and it never entered into your mind that such an essential component could be missing from the lives of the tolls you catch glimpses of over the internet. Funnily enough, what actually clues you in to how different you are is your name: Lena. Winston gave you for short, simple letters, and it was the dozenth of maybe a thousandth time someone asked you what it was short for that you began to intuit something was off.
Emilly didn’t care though. You were odd, and a little stuttery, and probably cull-bait but you stumbled into a gangly, adolescent matespritship even with all that in the way. When you wrapped that blood-colored scarf around her neck, you knew the two of you could survive anything.
As if belief alone could hold back Ascension. They held you from her screaming as she was escorted onto the waiting ship, and tolerated the agony from your burning throat only so long before the adult gripping your shoulder lost her patience. She broke your jaw, and you fell to the dirt in a spatter of bronze leaking from your mouth.
When the ship was only a prick of light in the sky, you picked up the scarf. It had fluttered to the ground as she was dragged away
(oh how you wished she was dragged away. But she had known, just like you had known, and she went to her fate with her head held high)
and you knelt and clutched it with brown stained hands. Hues, yours and hers, blending together. You promised you’d never stop searching.
After a who-knows-how-long sleep in the dirt, it takes the drone whirring seconds to ka-thunk to life. Precious seconds, without which you would be dead for even a drone as old as this one is going to have pinpoint accuracy. You’re already flashstepping behind it, your duel-pulsekind flipping from your specibus, layering a round into its back. It turns, but too slowly, creaking as it does while cascades of sand leak from its joints. You flashstep again, a little to your left of where you first started.
It lurches when your second round hits it in the side. One more pulse should do it-
But your final step is anticipated. In what may have been an attempt to trip you, the drone tilts to the side, extending one of its strutpods to clothesline your own.
You barrel into it at full force. A second later you’re free, rolling gracelessly in the dirt at top speed until you slam into the cloister wall and feel every bone in your flesh prison ache.
The drone doesn’t fair much better. When you finally stagger to your feet, it is sparking; interfering with a flashstepping organic generally isn’t good for ones health. You wait, pistols poised, every smarting muscled tensed.
Eventually, it falls over dead.
“Woo,” you say wiping your sweating brow. Touching your radio you add, “ran into a spot of trouble with the old defenses but I think…”
In the unmoving desert of pink sand, it’s impossible to miss when two more mounds of dust begin to come to life.
“…I think you’re bloody joking.”
“Sorry chica, but I don’t play those games,” she told you right off the bat.
It hadn’t helped.
When Sombra—as you got to know her better you would add an emphatic Sombra? Of all people? to that thought—first agreed to help you, you couldn’t believe your luck. More like you didn’t know you luck, because even in the Aspirant’s greatest hacker had randomly taken in interest in the plight of an Overwatch agent, it didn’t come strings free. Mainly the fact that she was a flighty broad who could drive you crazy at the slightest remark.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you’d snarled. Unconvincing, because she’d set you on edge and you were gripping the back of her pilot’s chair like your life depended on it.
“This. The pitched tango. The kismesis shimmy. The caliginous can-can. You’ve got this mad hatred for me, and I know I’m very easy to hate, but I’d rather not lead you on.”
“I don’t hate you,” you said, looking at that smug smile through her layer of makeup and wanting to simply bite.
“Suuuure taradita…if you say it enough everyone will believe it too. Just trying to be upfront is all. I’ve been working on it you know, coming to terms I just don’t pitch the way I should. Middle leaf has been helping me through some therapy and I’m very in touch with my emotions these days.”
“Well it doesn’t matter, since I don’t.” You teeth hurt from clenching.
“Great,” she said leisurely. “So glad that’s settled. Now if you’ll let me go? I can’t exactly find your pretty little jade when I’m facing this direction.”
You released the back of her chair. If only that had been the end, instead of a terribly painful beginning.
An hour later, you limp into the dark and damp below the planet’s surface.
Every inch of you hurts; organs you didn’t know you had, bits of troll you worry you don’t have any longer. You trail handprints along the wall, bleeding, other arm around your middle where the wind has been knocked out of you so thoroughly it hurts to pull it back in. But you’ll bounce back. You have to. Because the cloister is empty.
“Pickup,” you say into your radio.
“Aw, taradita….the deserted cloister turned out to be deserted?”
As always that voice gives you flashes of a part of yourself you didn’t even know you had. You tamp it down, give basic instructions where your personal craft can reconnect with Sombra’s orbiting space-bound, and marvel how the universe just takes and takes. One girl forever out of your reach, one girl painfully within who smiles as she turns the other cheek.