#too tired rn
Water sluices over her in hot sheets and drowns out the din of the world.
Legs drawn up to her chest, Satya sits on the shower bench with teeth clenched and jaws set. A prickling headache beats through her temples and behind her eyes. Toes tucked together, she rests her weight into the balls of her feet before pushing up and coaxing her movements toward the cool tile of the shower stall. She lets her body ease into a repetitive rhythm of forward and back, forward and back, the undersides of her feet against the very edge of the bench. Continuous pattering drums across her shoulders and over her head, and even if it isn’t like when she’d retreat to her instructor’s studio and dance until her legs stung, it feels just as safe, calm, controlled.
Sometimes she wishes she could handle the battlefield better.
The droning puncture of gunfire, the familiar crack of explosives, the creaks and clatters of Reinhardt’s armor, the heavy thump of each teammate’s footstep, the moan of machinery, the bellows of her lungs, the pounding swell of her heart—everything is so tightly meshed into an environment she cannot control. The years have taught her to compartmentalize combat into a separate niche; she must make decisions that decide the fates of many, and she ushers the clamour down into a faraway place in the hollow of her chest so that she can do her duty and perform as best she can.
Only afterward does it come splitting up out of her like black tar, coating her throat and carving at her eyes and splintering through her eardrums. It consumes and smothers and wrenches her consciousness out of her body and makes her watch as she sits alone, composure frayed, watching as buckshot plies Jesse open or as Genji’s cybernetics are shorn away or as Lena rewinds from the reach of rocketing shrapnel. Angela breathes life into them and Ana erases the marks of war, but all of it does little to scour dark whips of blood from her mind’s eye.
Satya continues to rock. Her throat hurts, a tight and twisting knot.
Her missions given by Vishkar were nothing like this. Some were clandestine, hushed, and others were confrontation in broad daylight. Combat never escalated to this scale. She had thought herself prepared, and even after all these months of immersing herself into Overwatch and its endeavors, there are still times when she realizes that she may never be.
“Symmetra?”
She flinches at the sound of her moniker. There is no mistaking the accent.
Jamison must have recognized her belongings. The case for her prosthesis must have been a dead giveaway, and if that hadn’t been the culprit, he must have noticed her clothes. Her elegant dress has its telltale blue bordered with golden trim, and as of this moment, a sizable portion of it has been stained with blood. She’d nearly torn it off herself as she’d clambered for the shower, the stark imagery of him trying to breathe with a crushed lung branded against the undersides of her eyes.
“You… you all right in there?”
It’s hesitant. He never sounds hesitant. Amused, yes. Cocksure, yes. And on the rare occasion, somber and sincere. But hesitant? No. That isn’t like him at all.
Satya doesn’t answer. She digs her fingers into the meat of her thigh and bites at her lip, eyes stinging under the water. If she could talk, she might tell him no, no, she’s not all right, that she’s a right mess and she feels like screaming and punching a wall but all of that leads to bad memories so she’s cooped up naked in a shower stall trying to keep things bottled up; she wants to tell him she doesn’t know why he’s even in here despite their stupid talks in the workshop and his wonderment at her craft and their mutual apologies concerning first impressions because none of that means he should be here, not when she’s like this, and she doesn’t want to drag him into any of it but a part of her desperately wishes for something to keep her grounded—
“Right, look, I—well, I don’t know what’s happened, but I ain’t never seen you disappear like that. Don’t seem like you.” He then pauses, as if unsure, and she thinks she can hear the scuffing sound of him picking up her dress off the cold floor to set over top of the wooden bench outside her stall. “S’just… different, I guess. Not like usual. Not the normal alone time thing. I know how that is.”
She supposes he does. He’s been around her enough. More than enough, perhaps. She shouldn’t know his personal routines like she knows her own.
“I got something new I been working on,” he says, a lower timbre among the tile walls. “Just a gadget. Nothing special. Nothing explodey, either. Just reckon you might be interested. Y’know, if you wanna take your mind off things.”
Satya sinks her teeth into her tongue as she rocks. Steam fills her lungs with every breath. Her hair drizzles down over her eyes in wet strands and the heat of the water stings her shoulders and the drumming echo of pattering drops fills in the spaces she cannot. Too many things crowd the back of her mouth, too many you almost diedandwhy are you so unaffectedandJamison you truly almost diedandyes please anything let me focus on anything, but no matter how she works her throat, the words will not come.
“Right.” Jamison’s steps shift outside of the stall, granting a greater distance between himself and her sanctuary. “Right, so, if you need anything, just give us a shout, yeah? We’re around.”
His departure is marked by the uneven shff-click of his boot and peg, and then the thrum of running water drowns it out under its hands. She remembers the wheezing noise he’d made with each breath, the wild panic steeped in his eyes, the way the tendons in his left hand tensed as he’d tried to reach for someone, something, anything, and she slams her back against the shower wall.
“Stay,” she says. It isn’t her voice, not this hoarse and shaking thing, but she pulls it out of her and hums it against the back of her tongue and forces it still: “Stay.”
At first, she thinks it’s too quiet for him to hear. His hearing isn’t the best, especially with white noise encompassing the room, and she has little faith that her request managed to find its way over the drone. But a moment or two passes, and then she can hear his familiar gait returning over the pathing water below her feet. When he stops, it’s still a good distance away as if he suspected he’d been hearing things, and it’s another few moments before he replies.
“Hold up. You did said stay, didn’t you? S’not the acoustics in here or anything, is it?” A brief pause, considering, and then, “Two hits ‘gainst the wall for yes, one for no.”
Slowly, Satya uncurls her arm from around her leg. Balling her hand into a tight fist, she knocks twice against the metal stall.
Jamison laughs, sounding pleased. “And here I was thinking me right ear was bad.”
She isn’t sure where, but she thinks he sits down on one of the benches outside the stalls. All she has to gauge his position is the continuous sound of his peg tapping against the floor, and with how sound is handled in the washroom, that could be almost anywhere. Still, it provides something else she can turn her attention to, as his presence is a tangible, anchoring thing, something far more concrete than the heaving memory splayed on the ground with broken ribs.
“Did I ever tell you ‘bout the biggest mecha fight in Junkertown? Don’t remember if I did.” He makes a thoughtful noise, and she imagines him shrugging on the bench, his elbows propped up by bowed knees. “Eh, either way, it’s a good one. Was about five years ago, they put together this real ripper tourney. Had all sorts of big ones, pilots from all over the Outback. Not sure if you’d be too keen on all the explosions, oh, but it was perfect.”
The water continues to pour, the heat sinking into her skin and down the curve of her spine. Jamison’s voice wells up over the constant rhythm, boasting of cannons and machine guns and the clash of metal titans, and it paints a vivid picture to oust the lingering tar clinging to the inside of her ribs and pressed over her mouth.
Swallowing down the pain in her throat, Satya shuts her eyes, rocks, and listens.
