Chapter Text
The first time it had happened, Emily chalked it up to a figment of her imagination.
She’d been walking home from the tube stop, shopping bag in hand, when she’d caught a glint of sunlight reflecting off something on a rooftop. She’d looked up and would swear there had been a flicker of movement, but she’d dismissed it immediately. Aside from Lena hopping around up there, now and then, nobody would be hanging about on the rooftops.
It was probably a squirrel that had found something shiny.
A few days later, Lena came home from “work” looking unsettled – looking pale as a sheet, honestly – and Emily had immediately dropped what she’d been doing to take the slightly shorter woman’s hands in her own. “What’s happened? Was someone hurt? Are you alright?”
Lena wordlessly pulled her in for a hug and Emily held her tight, ignoring how the fairing of Lena’s harness struck her in the chest until Lena finally spoke. “I don’t know. It was…I’m not hurt but I don’t…no, sorry, luv, I'm not OK.”
Emily nodded, pressing a gentle kiss against her lover’s forehead. “I understand. Let me turn the stove off and I want you to tell me about it, all right?”
“Right,” Lena agreed as she let go, her fingers lingering against the redhead’s hip, “I’ll do my best.”
A few minutes later, they sat on their couch, Lena out of her tactical gear and wrapped securely in a blanket that Emily had draped over her, the accelerator plugged into the outlet next to the window so it could recharge, while Emily waited patiently for her to find the words she needed.
“We hit a Talon base today,” Lena finally began, “in a pretty nasty part of Columbia. Jesse had been staking it out for a while, and when we got word that Reaper was expected to show up, Winston decided it was a good opportunity to try capturing him along with hurting Talon’s operations.”
“Ok,” Emily replied encouragingly, “makes sense. So what happened?”
“We hit the base. That part went just about like clockwork. But when we tried to corner Reaper…he managed to bust the trap Angela had given us – she thought it would keep him from doing the smoke thing, and it did for a few seconds, but then he broke out. We couldn’t put him down fast enough.”
Lena paused, her eyes flicking to the window, then back to make eye contact with her girlfriend again. “I was trying to chase him down. Managed to tag him with a pretty good shot, enough to make him stumble to the ground. Turned him over and was going to try whacking him with my pistol to see if it would knock him out when he told me something.”
Emily frowned. “Go on…”
Lena closed her eyes, then took a deep breath before she spoke again. “He said Widowmaker went rogue from Talon three weeks ago. Then he said…he asked…‘So how’s the girlfriend, Oxton?’ and the bastard started to laugh.” Lena shivered despite the blanket. “He got away. I froze up. My fault. I spent the whole flight back to Watchpoint G so scared, Em. My hands were shaking so bad by the time I got to London that I had to ask Athena to do an AI assisted landing. Didn’t trust myself…I was so scared I’d get home and find a bullet hole in the window and you…”
Emily shuffled herself over on the couch so she could draw her girl into a hug. “If that bastard asks you that question again, you tell him she’s fine, and right pissed he gave you such a scare. I’m right here, OK? Right here and safe, I swear.”
Lena finally let her tears fall, and Emily softly whispered “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here” until the fear that had gripped the former test pilot had been finally been dispelled.
Neither realized a silent figure was watching from three buildings away.
At Lena’s quiet insistence, Emily started to vary her routines a bit – taking different routes when she left the flat for work or to shop, making sure she got food from different restaurants rather than going back to the same spots for lunch or takeaway, using Lena’s car to run errands sometimes, taking the bus or the tube at other times.
Despite the very serious reasons behind it all, Emily couldn’t help but think of it as sort of a game. How many different ways could she figure out to, say, pick up a coffee on any given day?
She’d been playing the game for over a month, and it was beginning to get a bit boring to her, but it made Lena happy to hear her describe all her crazy routes, so she was doing her best to stick with it.
Unwittingly, she’d repeated her route four times in that period.
Unknowingly, she’d been tailed three of those times.
Each of the men who had attempted to stalk her through her day were found dead in a completely different part of the city, each seemingly of natural causes.
Emily just kept going about her life, unaware that she’d acquired a particularly lethal guardian angel.
She caught another glimpse a few weeks later. Emily had been running late to meet Lena for dinner after the tube had been delayed, leaving her half walking, half running through the cold London rain, the hood of her raincoat bouncing off her head. Stuck at the zebra crossing, she turned to watch the traffic and caught a flick of a long, dark ponytail from the corner of her eye. A hint of skin that seemed…off, somehow.
She turned back, and just for an instant she would swear she saw a tall figure in a dark coat in the alleyway between a chip shop and a jewelers, but a heartbeat later she was gone.
They were in bed that night when Emily decided she had to know. “Lena, I know you don’t like to talk about work, especially when it's about her, but…can you describe her to me?”
Lena’s brows knit as she pushed herself up on an elbow. “Who…wait, y’mean describe Widowmaker?”
Emily nodded. “I was thinking that if I’m supposed to be keeping an eye out, I don’t really know much about her.” Despite the serious nature of the conversation, she couldn’t help but smile a little. “Well, aside from ‘Cor, blimey, you would not believe the arse on her’ and ‘I have no idea how she files around on that grappling hook with her tits half hanging out like that’. Not exactly useful if I’m looking over my shoulder.”
The blush that spread across Lena’s face was adorable, and Emily nearly aborted the discussion in favor of kissing her silly goose of a girl, but Lena straightened up a bit, and the serious look in her eyes demanded Emily’s full attention.
“She’s a bit taller than you – close to six feet in those ridiculous heels she wears, so she’s probably about five foot eight or nine without. Her skin is kind of somewhere between blue and purple. Periwinkle, I guess? Gets a bit more purple if you get her pissed off, but generally it’s a pretty cool shade. Her eyes are sort of…they’re more golden than yellow? Not, like, hazel but actually gold. I’d swear they glitter sometimes. If she wasn’t looking over a rifle’s sights at me when I usually see them, it would be pretty stunning.”
Emily nodded, thinking of the figure she thought she’d seen. “What about her hair?”
“It’s sort of…dark indigo? I think she dyes it. I asked Angie once if that could have been from whatever Talon did to her, and she insisted hair color doesn’t change like that, but we really don’t understand half what those bastards did to the woman she used to be. Keeps it in a really long ponytail, which is kind of silly really – it’s like she wants me to grab it when we’re fighting…”
Emily grinned. “Focus, Flight Lieutenant Oxton.”
Lena stuck out her tongue. “Seriously, though, it makes no sense at all. I keep my hair short for a reason, you know.”
Emily raised an eyebrow. “Aside from getting into your old flight helmets, or that you like it when I grab your hair?”
Lena sputtered, giggling, and Emily moved in for the kill, her hands sliding around her lover's sides. She still wasn’t entirely sure if she’d seen Widowmaker…but she had a suspicion. But if it was her, if this woman wanted to kill her, why wasn’t she doing anything? What could that mean?
It concerned her, but she had better things to focus on tonight – starting with giving Lena’s hair a tug just like that.
Four months after Reaper’s threat, Emily finally got a good look at the woman who kept intersecting at the corners of her life. Unfortunately, she also got a good look at the Talon operatives who had been attempting to corner her, too.
She’d decided to go back to her favorite coffee shop to unwind after work, mentally fried after a long day, and didn’t bother with the game. She just walked the most direct route because she wanted a slice of lemon bar and a latte, nothing else.
Her plans were changed when a leather-gloved hand wrapped around her mouth, dragging her back into the alleyway she had just passed, her surprised cry muffled by the thick material.
“Keep her still!”
“Grab her bag!”
“Zipties!”
She couldn’t follow how many of them there were. She thought it was three? Maybe four? Could it be five? All the voices were male. Hard plastic was wrapped around her wrists, biting painfully into her skin. Panic made everything crystal sharp and dizzingly blurry at the same time as Emily tried to summon enough breath from her heaving chest to scream, to get loose, to run.
Then one of the men’s voices suddenly grunted in pain and the world spun as she was tossed roughly to the ground.
The dark clad woman – her apparent guardian angel – had dropped into the alley from one of the rooftops and landed on the man who had seized her. The Widowmaker stood slowly, putting herself between Emily and the thugs. For a long moment the world seemed to freeze, then started again on fast forward as the mysterious woman began to demolish the six(!) men who had been there to kidnap her.
Some part of Emily’s brain suddenly recalled a few words of a long ago Sunday School lesson that she had almost completely forgotten.
In Scripture, the angels had to greet Mankind with the words “Be Not Afraid” because they were terrifying.
One of the men produced a knife from his coat. The dark clad woman – yes, her skin was periwinkle, really, Lena was right – slipped inside of his reach with a move that was too fast for Emily to follow, wrenched the blade from his hand, then slammed the pommel into his throat, sending him to the ground choking and gasping for air.
Another attempted to get Widowmaker from the side. The assassin whirled away from his charge, then dropped and used her momentum to sweep his legs out from under him, popping back up as if she’d been spring loaded.
The fourth kidnapper bellowed a wordless challenge, but Widowmaker remained silent as she counter charged, slamming the knife she’d taken up and under his ribcage, the air leaving his lungs with a sudden gasp before he dropped bonelessly to the ground.
The fifth had pulled a snub nosed pistol from his coat, but Widowmaker relieved him of it the same way she’d taken the knife away from his friend, putting an elbow strike into his temple to send him to the ground.
The last man standing had started running, but Widowmaker dropped the pistol she’d liberated into her coat pocket and then raised her hand, making a fist as she fired her grappling hook out from the gauntlet she’d kept hidden under her coat’s broad sleeve.
The hook bit into the dumpster just ahead of where he’d been running, and Widowmaker zipped towards him as the grapple reeled her in. Her free hand came out to seize the back of his neck in an iron grip, yanking him off his feet and slamming his face into the refuse container with a loud CLANG.
The fight couldn’t have lasted more than half a minute.
Before Emily had really processed everything that had just happened, Widowmaker appeared, kneeling down next to her with the same knife she’d just used to kill one of her attackers.
Lena was right about her golden eyes being stunning, too. She looked…alien, really. An exotic, almost otherworldly beauty.
Her still shocked mind had nearly lost herself in those thoughts when a splash of sunlight reflected off the knife, drawing her attention downward, catching a bit of blood still staining the blade’s edge.
There was a moment of pain as the zipties went taut against the knife’s edge, and then the plastic gave way, releasing her hands. She felt pins and needles as the blood began to flow back into her fingertips, but other than angry red marks where the ties had dug into her wrists, she was unhurt.
Widowmaker helped her to her feet, then silently handed Emily back her purse.
Emily tried to stammer out her thanks, but couldn’t manage words before she watched the dark clad woman raise her arm and fire her grapple again, disappearing as suddenly as she’d appeared.
Emily stumbled into the coffee shop and told the owner that someone had just tried to mug her. Given that Lena was technically a “person of interest” for violating the PETRAS Act, she couldn’t just say “my girlfriend is a superhero and the baddies she fights just tried to kidnap me”, after all, and how could she even begin to explain what had really happened when she didn’t understand it herself?
As it was, the patrolwoman from the Plod who interviewed her was happy to take a statement that group of men had tried to grab her, and she’d managed to yank her bag back and get away, and Emily was certainly shaken up enough to make it realistic.
After finishing with the police and drinking a cuppa on the house, Emily called a cab to take her home. She didn’t notice the dark shape that paced her the from the rooftops the entire way, but some part of her had a feeling it was there. Leaving the cab and getting into the building became a blur as the adrenaline crash hit her, and the last thing she remembered was slumping against the stairwell railing as she climbed towards their floor.
When Lena came home, she found Emily asleep on the couch, still fully dressed. The door had been locked from the inside, and there was a take-home container from the coffee shop with two slices of lemon bar sitting on their kitchen table.
After Lena gently woke her up, she noticed the marks against her pale wrists and asked what had happened as she tenderly led her lover back to bed.
Emily tried to explain as best she could, but it was already difficult to put the experience into words – what had been real and what had been the product of her panicked imagination?
“I was walking to Travonna, you know, the coffee place, and suddenly someone had grabbed me from behind. I tried to scream but there was a hand over my mouth and I couldn't breathe! Everything started to spin, and I thought I heard someone else start fighting with them, and all of the sudden the one holding me let go...”
She took another breath, trying to make her voice stop shaking. “I ran as hard as I could and made it to the shop – they called the police and I knew I couldn’t tell the Plod ‘My girl is Tracer, you know, the superhero vigilante’, so I just told them I got mugged. They did a police report and I think I got a cab home and I don’t even remember getting inside or falling asleep on the couch, honestly…”
“Shhh, it’s alright…” Lena drew her close and now it was her turn to cry, the shock of it all suddenly fresh again. Emily clung to her for dear life, taking deep shuddering breaths as she felt Lena’s hands gently stroke circles along her back. “You’re safe, and you did exactly the right thing – you got somewhere safe and public and you’re home now and you’re safe and I’m so proud of you, OK? I’m so sorry I wasn’t home…I should have been there for you.”
Emily shook her head, sniffling. “I knew you’d be home as soon as you could. You’re saving people, Lena, I know how much that matters.”
Lena smiled sadly. “I could save a thousand people and it wouldn’t mean a damn if I found out you got hurt along the way, Em. I’m just relieved…whoever broke up those thugs, I owe them a year’s worth of pints at the Black Unicorn.”
Emily nodded, falling back onto the bed and Lena's reassuring warmth, slim arms holding her just tightly enough to feel comforting rather than ensnaring. “Love you, Lena…Love you so much!”
“Love you too, pet.” Lena gently kissed the redhead’s forehead, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly as she processed through her own fear and relief. “Think I’ll call Winston in the morning. Tell him I need some time off.”
Emily pulled back just enough to meet her lover’s honey colored eyes with her own. “You sure?”
Lena smiled. “Angie’s a card carrying member of the ‘Lena is trying to do too much’ club. She’ll be delighted to hear I'm taking some time. Athena can drive the bus for a little while, or Hana can do some basic piloting in a pinch. I know Winston will understand, especially once I fill him in on what’s happened.”
Nodding, Emily nibbled at her lip in thought for a second. “It’d be nice to have some extra time with you, even if I hate the reason behind it. I can shift things around at the office, too. I need to burn a few vacation days anyway, and if I give them the edited version I’m sure Mr. Peel will tell me to take all the time I need.”
Lena laughed lightly. “There you are, then. We’ll have a little stay-cation here, watch some movies maybe, let the world get by without us for a few days.”
Laying back down, Emily let her eyes close again as Lena snuggled against her, the reassuring presence reminding her that she was OK, that she was safe.
As she began to drift off, she found herself looking through the window, and for a moment she would swear that she had seen a tall silhouette looking back at her from a distant rooftop.
Between the comforting light of her lover and the silent vigil of her shadowy guardian, Emily slept soundly through the night.