Chronal Disassociation Ch. 51

After a couple of hours figuring out just what had happened, several more Overwatch personnel were sent to the Polish hospital they were staying in. More or less, they were to provide relief and support to the staff there - and more importantly, security. With the heightened tensions of a terrorist organization in their borders, the Polish government quickly approved of their deployment, if only to ease the public.

Those few hours also meant that all of the news that the media had managed to cover had made it all over the world by now. Which led to the current situation the pilot found herself in.

Lena shuffled awkwardly as she stood outside of Captain Amari’s room. With her, two other Overwatch agents did the same, though to a much less obvious degree. One of them even made a show of deliberately turning so that they weren’t as pressed up against the doorway as they usually were.

All because of the crying they could hear from inside said room.

When a woman around Lena’s age came bursting into the hospital, wearing military fatigues of all things, she was unsure of what exactly to do. Upon closer look though, on the features that the woman had, and the utter despair on her face made her understand just who she was, even before the shouting had started.

Fareeha Amari. Ana Amari’s daughter, who had heard the news of her mother’s injury over social media. And, judging from all the buzz online, it put the impression that the captain had died. Little wonder that Fareeha would drop everything and book a flight to Poland on such short notice.

She didn’t blame Fareeha for getting angry when the Overwatch agents and doctors refused to let her know about the captain's condition. The feeds had screamed “dead” before anyone could correct them, and once the word sticks, people won’t let go. And when a bunch of people adamantly refuse to let you see your mum?

If it was Lena in her shoes, she also might've punched that agent too.

The pilot had to mediate between everyone for a few minutes after that. The doctors were sympathetic, yes, but there was an underlying fear there - of being the next one to get punched, most likely. The Overwatch side of things were a bit more of a pain, since they were under strict orders to prevent anyone from entering the area where the captain was.

Thankfully, by virtue of being part of the strike team, Lena technically outranked them, and guided Fareeha over to where her mother was.

Which led to the situation where Lena had to step out of the room to give the mother and daughter some privacy.

“Ma’am?” One of the agents spoke quietly. Lena shook her head, even though she still felt a twinge of embarrassment at being spoken to so politely.

“Give it a tick.”

Captain Amari was alive. Her daughter was in the room talking to her. Yet, without her memories, could this really be better? Lena was of the opinion that experiences made you who you are, and without them, could you really be called yourself?

Could you really call the woman that they called Ana Amari be that same Ana Amari without having remembered the life she lived?

Lena didn’t know that answer to that, and she didn’t know if she ever wanted one.

…

It took another five minutes for the door to open once more. When Fareeha stepped outside, she looked remarkably composed. Lena, however, could spot that it was the forced calm that one learned to master while in the military.

“Thank you for letting me visit, Mrs. Oxton.”

“Call me Lena, please.”

The corner of Fareeha's mouth tugged like she wasn’t sure whether to smile or hold the line. They walked out of the hallway together, silent as a grave. Neither really knew what to say, even less so on Lena's side.

It was Fareeha that broke it.

“She doesn’t know me." Her voice shook as she did so, "She was polite. She asked my name. She apologized." Fareeha almost broke down again then and there, even as she tried to hide it. Lena didn’t know what to say. Instead, she put a hand to the other woman’s shoulder.

Fareeha didn’t even seem to notice it as she continued, “You know the last thing I said to her? We were arguing, and-and I said that I wanted to join Overwatch. When she said no, I said-I said I hated her and just ran.”

Lena didn’t try to spin it. There’s no line that fixes a sentence like that. She squeezed Fareeha’s shoulder once, the way someone does when words fall short and you hope warm skin says what smart sentences can’t.

“I’m, I’m sorry, I’m just dumping this all on you.” Fareeha stopped in the middle of walking, leaning instead on a wall. She slowly slid down it, tilting her head up with force, enough for Lena to hear the impact it made, “I-I need some time to think.”

Lena opened her mouth, an offer of support on her lips, only for her communicator to go off, Angela’s voice coming through,  “Lena, Commander Morrison is calling a strike team meeting.”

To the comms, “Roger that, Ange.”

To Fareeha, who sat staring at the ceiling with a blank look on her face, “Look, I’m not really good at this, but…if you want someone to talk to, my door’s always open.” Archer would call it her bleeding heart, but Lena just couldn’t stand seeing someone in the state Fareeha was in was…

Yeah. She hated it.

Nobody deserved something like this happening, especially to a loved one that they couldn’t even help.

Seeing as she was getting no reply though, not that she expected one, Lena excused herself to leave for the meeting.

…

When she entered, the others - including Winston and Reinhardt who’d arrived with the Overwatch reinforcements -  were already there. Unlike every other meeting, though, where Commander Morrison would be the one in front, it was Archer who was at the front. The Spirit’s countenance was much more serious than normal, if that was even possible.

Oh boy. She knew where this was going.

And indeed, when she sat down, Archer immediately started to speak, “Good, everyone’s here. Sombra?”

“Aye, aye, boss.”

In an instant, there was a pulse of purple, and Lena heard her own comms power down. She wasn’t all too worried, since the commanders sure weren’t. Likely, Archer had cleared this with them beforehand, though the fact he hadn’t told her what they were doing was curious in itself.

Unlike her, however, Winston and the others weren’t as composed. The scientist even threw her a worried glance, specifically towards her accelerator. She shot him a placating nod, indicating that it was safe for her, since she would have felt it if her accelerator was messed with.

“Apologies, but this had to be done. Operational security.” Archer nodded once, “From this point on, no information about this meeting is to be recorded, all mentions of it will be purged, and for all intents and purposes, none of us were here at this time.”

“A bit dramatic, ain’t it?” Cassidy raised an eyebrow, “I’m assuming that this is about whatever the hell happened in that damned bunker. Would be mighty suspicious if we don’t talk about it.”

“Yes, it does involve that, but I would rather it be suspicious than to risk all conscious life on the planet.”

At that, everyone just about leaned forward in alarm, with the exception of Commander Morrison, who nodded grimly, “Debrief about the mission will officially come later. For now, Archer has informed me somewhat of the situation. I believed it’d be better to discuss it with all of you who’d all been exposed.”

“Um.” Winston raised a hand, “Sir? Neither me nor Reinhardt were part of the mission.”

“Yes, but for your parts, you will be exposed to it sooner or later. If what Archer told me was anywhere close to the truth, then we’ll need the best help, with the least people involved.”

“Alright, alright, just tell us already will you?” Cassidy waved a hand in front of him. For a moment, Lena could spot him draw out a cigar from his poncho, only to stop. The pilot saw him glance at an empty spot where the captain would usually be, and he quietly tucked the cigar out of sight.

Archer took a sweeping look around the room, eyes narrowed. There were no words from him, not immediately. Only a calculating stare at each one of the strike team members directly involved, including Lena herself. Even the pilot felt nervous under his gaze, seeing as he hadn’t deigned to speak through their mental connection.

“As you may know, I am a Heroic Spirit. I’ve detailed to you the fundamental Classes that a Heroic Spirit - also known as a Servant - can be summoned into. I’ve also detailed some Extra Classes that can rarely appear. However, I have deliberately excluded one Class from that list, for the reason that just knowing about them is dangerous enough.”

Lena had already braced for the word itself to sting. Archer let the silence stretch till it went thin, till even Cassidy stopped fidgeting with that cigar he wasn’t going to light.

“The Class I left out,” Archer said, voice clipped, “is Foreigner.”

They felt it at that moment. The same thing that Lena had felt when Archer was speaking with O’Deorain. Eyes. ON THEM.

WATCHING.

OF A HUNDRED THOUSAND STARS BLINKING INTO EXISTENCE. A VOID OF TEETH BREATHING AND DREAMING. AN ENDLESS EXPANSE OF CLOUDLESS NEBULAS.

Then nothing.

“H-Holy fuck, what the fuck was that?” Surprisingly, it wasn’t Cassidy that spoke. Rather, it was Commander Reyes himself, eyes wide and subtly trembling.

Not that everyone else bar Archer was in a different state. In fact, both commanders were the most composed, while everyone else was in various states of panic attack, even Lena herself.

That…that was much, much worse than with O’Deorain.

“You did not mention any of that earlier.” Commander Morrison recovered quickly, just barely keeping himself composed, “I want an explanation, and I want it yesterday.”

“Apologies, but, first, I want to make it clear that I don’t want to talk about this. It is only through necessity that I will be discussing even an iota of what that Class involves. Thankfully, the powers that be usually don’t care to stick their heads into places without any of their vessels involved. They likely only took a peek since I used that Class’ name, and even then, I’ll admit I didn’t expect that kind of response.”

A grunt from Reyes as he shifted in his seat, “And these ‘powers that be’ are?”

“Outer Gods.” Just about everyone in the room blankly stared at Archer, with the curious exception of Reyes himself, “That is to say, they are beings that exist outside of our realm of understanding. Or, in other words, their way of thinking is foreign to human consciousness.”

“Fuck me, that just sounds like Lovecraftian horror type of shit.” Reyes grumbled, rubbing a hand through his hair, “Don’t tell me that we’re up against shit like C-”

“Don’t.” Archer fixed the commander with a glare so fierce that the other man drew back somewhat, “While I am curious how you know about Lovecraft’s works, you have to understand that when he wrote them, he believed them to be fiction. The truth is, as you can probably tell, they are very much real. They won’t respond to people that believe them to still be fiction - but since I am telling you this, they will to you.”

“O’Deorain’s arm.” Genji looked at Archer, “That’s where you’re going with this, yes? That arm was too unusual, even for her.”

“Yes. I believe that she was able to contact an Outer God and receive its ‘blessings’. How or why, I don’t know, and frankly, I wasn’t going to try and find out.” Archer closed his eyes in frustration.

“Why not?” Reinhardt asked, even though he was just now calming down, “If she had found a way, then all the more reason why we should know to prevent it from happening again.”

“Normally, you’d be right. Unfortunately, the method I used to extract information from her might have led to exposing myself to the Outer God, memory or not. As such, I deemed the risk of having myself be mentally corrupted was too much. After all, we still do not fully understand the reason why I am here, nor the method I was summoned with in the first place. Should I be corrupted, then there is frankly very little that could stop me.”

That he wasn’t even bragging was the scariest part of Archer's words.

“Moreover, I couldn’t risk killing O’Deorain as she had the favor of that Outer God. If we piss it off, then I have no idea how it would respond. This brings me to the main reason why I wanted this meeting in the first place: we were exposed to the vessel - or a person becoming a vessel - of an Outer God. That exposure is sticky. It can ride in on attention and stay because you fed it a seat at the table.”

“Sticky.” Cassidy snorted, “Hell of a field manual term.”

“Would you prefer parasitic?” Archer didn’t blink, “Point stands.”

Lena flexed her hands to shake out the cold. It didn’t leave. It had sunk deeper than skin. For a second she could still feel it. The weightless, yawning pressure, as if the ceiling had turned into sky and that sky had decided it was alive and curious. She swallowed. Her heartbeat had started up again, but it didn’t sound like hers.

Morrison cut in, clipped as a metronome. “Rules of engagement?”

“Rule one.” Archer said. “Don’t say the name of that Class again. The term itself is a hook. What we'll call it will be up for debate, if we even need to reference it again. Preferably one that is so generic that we can't even think of permanently assigning it as the designation. Outside this room, you don’t reference it at all.”

Reinhardt frowned, “A name alone can harm? That is new to me.”

"Servants and Heroic Spirits hide their True Names for a reason. We are more of concepts given form if anything. This means that concepts that the collective of humanity believes in can do more harm than you would think. Take for example, Queen Medb, who was said to have been killed by getting hit by a bit of cheese. I can tell you from personal experience that when our enemy found out her name, they really did start launching cheese at her. And while it didn't kill her, they dropped her capabilities so much that it might very well have, had we not been there.

"What I'm saying is, that singular name for that Class holds so much conceptual power that we might find ourselves staring at something we don't want." After getting a round of nods of understanding, Archer continued.

“Rule two. If you find yourself having dreams with repeated shapes, tell me immediately. Tell Ziegler, tell anyone in this circle. Do not go back to sleep and ‘see what happens.’”

Reyes had recovered enough to look irritated again, “Nightmares get a hotline now? We’re stretched as it is.”

“Mental corruption rides on repetition.” Archer said, “Sort of like subliminal messaging. It’s low-cost for them and very expensive for us. Early is not optional, Commander.” He didn’t soften the title.

“Rule three. No catalogues, no lists, no taxonomies of any sponsors, as it were. If you’ve read fiction that sounds like this, fine. Treat it as fiction and park it. If you’ve memorized terms, unmemorize them.”

Lena eased her breathing until it felt like it belonged to her again. It didn’t. Not quite. The room still seemed a hair wider than it should be, as if the corners had unhooked themselves and drifted.

Archer didn’t let the silence stretch this time.

“Rule four.” He said. “No sigils. No chalk, ink, string, sculpture, or ‘I just doodled this while we talked’ nonsense. If you find yourself sketching the same shape twice, burn it. Do not show it to someone else. Do not save a photo ‘for later.’”

Winston, already holding a tablet he couldn’t use with comms blocked, lifted his hand halfway. “What constitutes a-”

“Anything repeated.” Archer cut in, “Circles, angles, nesting patterns, star-fields that won’t stay put. If you think you’re being silly, you’re doing it right.”

“Rule five.” His eyes ticked toward Sombra, “Electronics are a new problem. Memory isn’t just people anymore. It’s cameras and caches and algorithmic weight. Sombra, after this, you’ll wipe every device we carried today. No backups. Kill the backups of the backups.”

Sombra tilted her head like a cat told to sit, “All of them? Duele, guapo.”

“Hurts less than the alternative.”

Morrison folded his arms, calm returning in layers, “We’ll log a fictional meeting on the calendar to cover the time and file a bland after-action for the press. ‘Investigation ongoing.’ The usual.”

“That concludes most of everything that I needed to talk about.” Archer sat down with a sigh, “Any questions?”

“What do we do about O’Deorain?” Lena was the one to ask, her own interest in finding the mad scientist more than professional. She was the only lead they knew of for Amélie’s whereabouts. Archer knew this too, since they had spoken about it beforehand, but this time, he shook his head.

“They’re likely going to go to ground after this. Too much heat with what Talon did. What information I did manage to get was unreliable at most. No concrete data, no locations other than she was in a lab.” Meaning no data on her friend either. Bollocks.

“However, she is still a vessel. If she makes any move, it will be noticeable, since Outer Gods aren’t exactly known for their subtlety. Though, that makes it even worse, since it’s noticeable, it’ll likely be too late for whoever’s in the blast radius.”

There was a collective grimace at that.

“I am hopeful for one thing - that O’Deorain is smart enough not to try anything like that. When I was interrogating her, I could tell that she understood just how much of an ant she is in front of her sponsor. She knows that invoking any more than she already has will likely put her in a state that death is the preferable outcome.”

“Hope isn’t something that we want to be relying on, Archer.”

“It’s the best you’ll get.”

Winston cleared his throat, softer than usual, “I’ll draft cognitive hygiene procedures we can share verbally. Nothing written.”

“Short list.” Archer said, “Shorter than short.”

Sombra leaned against the wall and tipped her chin up at him, “And you still want every device wiped?” She made a circle motion over her head, “Even my toys?”

“Yours first.” He said. If he was joking, his face didn’t show it.

Not even Sombra's attempt at puppy-dog-eyes did anything to change that.

“Good.” Morrison pushed off the table. He had the steadiness of someone who’d learned to keep marching while the world did its best impression of a rug being yanked, “We’ll brief the rest of the team on nothing except operational next steps. This meeting didn’t happen.”

Morrison gave a short, final nod, “Meeting adjourned.” He looked over at Sombra, “Kill the bubble.”

Purple threads peeled away from the air. Lena felt her comm click back to life and heard the hospital again - she had forgotten that they weren't even in an Overwatch base for a while there.

Nobody in the room rushed for the door. They moved like people stepping off a boat whose deck was still moving under their feet.

Archer didn’t move at all. He watched the others file out with that flat look that meant he was listening to several things she couldn’t hear. When his eyes finally cut to her, she pretended she hadn’t been waiting for it and failed at pretending.

“You alright?” He asked, neutral.

“No.” Lena said, and surprised herself by smiling when she said it, “But I can walk a straight line.”

“That’ll do.”

They left together. It wasn’t planned, just the way their steps synced. Lena caught Winston’s eye in the hall. He gave her that soft, worried-bear look, the one that checked if she was eating and sleeping with a glance. She gave him a thumbs up she didn’t fully feel, and he didn’t fully believe. Close enough for government work.

Down the corridor, through the stairwell that always smelled faintly like wet stone and lemon cleaner, she exhaled slowly. The buzz in her head from, well, everything, didn’t stop. It slid from a shout to a radio under a pillow.

The stairwell spat them out on a quieter floor. The hum of machines and the shuffle of rubber soles filled the gaps where her thoughts didn’t want to sit. She rolled her shoulders till they felt like hers again.

“You’re sure you’re not going to faceplant?” Archer asked without looking at her. Typical. He could read a heartbeat through a wall but pretended he couldn’t hear a wobble in her step.

“I’ll grumble my way through it.” She tried to make it a joke and almost managed it.

They passed a trolley stacked with IV bags. The nurse pushing it paused, recognized the patch on Lena’s jacket and nodded. Lena nodded back, that weird, automatic exchange you get after long shifts and longer nights. It steadied her more than breathing exercises ever did.

“You told Morrison you didn’t want to talk about…that.” She meant the thing in the room that didn’t have a shape, and the look in everyone’s eyes after the word that wasn’t going to be said again. She didn’t say it. She wasn’t going to say it.

“I still don’t.” He said, “But I did.”

And she didn't need to ask. Not again. But she will.

“You said Amélie took the shot.” She kept her tone flat and it still shook.

He watched her, measuring. He always measured, “Yes.”

“Tell me you’re not guessing.” She didn’t need comfort. She needed something she could hold even if it cut.

“I’m not guessing.” He didn’t dress it up.

Her throat went tight, “Right.”

He let the quiet sit long enough to be a choice, “Ask me the question you’re avoiding.”

“That obvious?” She huffed a breath that wasn’t a laugh. “Fine. Do you think she’s gone? Not dead. Gone.” She tapped her temple. “All the way.”

“Do you want honesty or mercy?”

“I’m standing. Try honesty.”

“Then no.” His answer was immediate. “I don’t think she’s gone. I think she’s bound. Conditioning. Triggers. A life bent around an aim. People can be bent for a long time and not break.”

The relief was ridiculous and small and still mattered, “Then we can bring her back. We can save her.” The words came out too fast. She heard them and forced herself to slow. “We can try.”

“...Yeah. We can try.”

…

A/N: So, wrote a bit too much here that I kinda sorta forgot about Anomaly’s chapter. However, as of the time I am writing this note (about 15 minutes before I schedule this post) I have been thinking that I shift towards a two-week update schedule for each chapter instead. It will likely have to happen at some point, if I ever get a job, since most of what I’m applying for have their offices fairly far away from home that I'll be late in getting back.

And yes, I did take your advice Grant! And I’m glad to say I did end up scoring a couple interviews after talking with a couple recruiters, though they were primarily pre-interviews. Among those, the best result I’ve gotten is one that’s a technical interview scheduled in a couple of days, so wish me luck with that!

Finally, yeah, somehow, Master-Stranger protocols.