#MUY DIFICIL THANKYA

[docholligay]

Home Base: Part 2 of 2

This is the second half of @keyofjetwolf‘s commission! She asked for Pharah and Tracer friendship, and I included being gay for London as a bonus. Second half is 3,600 words, first half is here. Thank you so much, I hope you like it! 

Yellowed, smelling, and small should have been a given for the new Overwatch headquarters, seeing as it had started in an old, run-down pub that Pharah would have described using the same three words.

Tracer had skipped off to the underground as soon as Pharah had offered her lunch, moving down the side street and onto the main with the simple ease of someone who had spent the bulk of her life riding up and down the line. Pharah had no thought to ask where they might end up. Tracer knew a number of corners and alleyways in the city, restaurants and shops tucked away from the rest of the world, with buttery, melting scones; hot, dripping kebab; and rich, thick steak pies.

Pharah would never tell Tracer directly, but she quite enjoyed when Tracer skipped them around town for a small meal.

On this day, however, they rode the train for a long while until Tracer rose to her feet and skipped off, half in her own mind, and only remembering after half a moment that Pharah was supposed to be there, turning behind to see that she had already followed. Tracer was a creature of a busy mind and a busier body, and Pharah had learned how to read her and keep up with her, its own sort of military code. They criss crossed to another train wordlessly, and Pharah looked around the station, working out the map in her mind.

They were in Tracer’s own neighborhood now (their neighborhood, she corrected herself. At least for the time being.) Tracer was off in her own world, staring into the dark of the tunnel, her feet having guided her to the stop out of habit more than any conscious effort on her part.

Pharah touched her gently on the shoulder,  and she snapped back to this reality. “Why are we going to the house?”

“We isn’t.” Tracer grinned. “Good as you know the line, though.”

Pharah had been living in London for a little over a month. It was difficult to explain how she felt about the place, both underwhelmed and excited, a city she had visited but never felt the pulse of, so grey and dark and different from the places she had lived. When the question of the new headquarters had come up, when they decided to leave Alberta for a more central location, Tracer had immediately had a laundry list of reasons to select London. A center of world culture and industry, ample airports and railways, fine universities for Mercy and WInston to make connections. The most compelling reason of all, of course, was Tracer’s own love for the city, the way it was a part of her and her home, and neither she nor Mercy could match that--they were two tumbleweeds of a kind who had gotten caught together against the fenceline of their twin fates.  

Only Dva had a claim of love to Seoul, and even then she was not terribly displeased at the idea that the Korean paparazzi had less ground forces in London.

And so London it had been, with all other possibilities falling like dominoes in the face of Tracer’s bright enthusiasm for a gloomy city, that nearly caused you to believe in everything it could be right along with her. Tracer was the idea of London, Pharah had thought more than once, the fable of indomitable spirit and astounding resilience made flesh in a tiny Cockney avatar.

She was busy thinking this, again, when Tracer swung out of the train and popped up the stairs, Pharah’s long stride alongside her. As much time as Pharah had spent on this particular patch of London, she could not begin to think of where they were going.

“I might could…” Tracer was quietly mumbling to herself, rubbing her hand through her hair as she stared thoughtfully into the stone of the buildings, never breaking stride, Pharah simply walking close behind her, assuming her internal GPS would lead them where she meant for them to be, when Tracer stopped dead in her tracks, Pharah nearly getting tangled up with her and spilling them both to the pavement. “Right? Right.”

She turned around quickly on the busy road and and clipped back down the street. Pharah waited a beat, and then trotted in quickly next to her.

“Where are we going? Do you know?” She looked skeptically at Tracer, whose freckled face lit up in a smile so wide her eyes nearly closed.

“Buying flowers!” She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as if they had not been discussing lunch a mere thirty minutes earlier.

“What?” Pharah stood still for a moment as Tracer chirped over a flower shop display and plucked a single pink rose out of a well stocked bucket. “Tracer.”

“Trust me, love, its for me own good.” She giggled and turned to the grey haired shopkeeper, pulling a few coins out of her pocket.

“Don’t break too many ‘earts out there, Lena.” He gently chided her as he wrapped up the rose and returned it to her.

“Only ‘eart I ever break is me own, Alfie, and that’s the bloody truth.” She took a deep whiff of the rose as he playfully waved her away down the street.

“Explain to me what this has to do with lunch.” It was not said in an accusing way so much as a question with no mark, in the way Pharah did from time to time, her military years having somewhat chipped away at the finer graces of communication.

“Not ‘ungry,” she walked down the street, eyes sparkling and full of light, “I’ve an idea.”

Pharah could, and often did, accuse Tracer of many things. She was forgetful, she was impulsive, she was often unserious. But one thing she could never be accused of was being slow, and Pharah had often wondered and envied at how quickly her mind could whirl to an idea, to a choice, nothing like Pharah’s methodical and considered plotting.

Tracer led them to a small front on the main street, dark, old wood around dark, old windows, below a dark, old awning. The one bright spot in the whole front was the gilded letters spelling out the name of pub, even those flaking at the edges with little care paid to the need to repaint them, as if anyone who belonged here would already know that it was there.

Pharah stopped as she realized what it was.

“This is your bar.”

Tracer half-turned to look at her and nodded. “Me pub, right, yeah.”

Pharah had known Tracer for a number of years, had visited London with her more than once, and never had she taken Pharah, or, as far as she was aware, any of the Overwatch team, save Winston, to the bar she frequented. She had never so much as suggested it.  Pharah had never asked. It was Tracer’s space, a place where she was the local celebrity and hometown girl all in one, a nook where she had grown up, as had her family before, something inviolable and belonging to her alone.

Pharah had never expected to be asked to go there, and her heart pulled a little at the gesture.

But Tracer acted as if it where the most natural thing in the world, and so Pharah chastised herself for assigning anything to it, and followed her inside.

It was a threadbare place, the carpet pulling away from itself and exposing the yellowed underfloor. The stained glass sconces on the walls barely illuminated the place, delicately glowing onto the dark tables and pleasantly rounded pub chairs, a halo seeming to surround the pictures on the walls in their walnut frames, black and white moving to greyscale and then color, getting sharper and cleaner as the years came nearer, carbon dating in film. The bar itself did not seem to be built so much as it had grown out of the ground, dark and stalwart next to the bright blinking light of a betting machine.

But the attitude was convivial and warm, a few men playing billiards in the back, a woman wiping glasses behind the bar.

“Oi!” One of the men pointed his cue at Tracer. “Owe me three quid, you do.”

“Case of mistaken identity, love, ‘ard to remember as you swindle the lot of us, but it weren’t me, love.” But she grinned in her cheshire cat way, playing a game with people who’d known her the bulk of her life.

He snorted. “Only person I’d confuse with you is me thirteen year old cousin, and he don’t never lose darts to me.”

Tracer gave an appreciative laugh but waved him off, seemingly sure that there would always be an opportunity for him to collect, and slipped off her coat, careful of the rose she was holding.

“‘ow’s tricks, treacle?” Tracer bellied up to the bar and crossed her arms, leaning on her elbows as she smiled at the barmaid, no taller than Tracer herself and softly plump, her blonde hair tied up in a messy bun.

“Lena Oxton.” She tossed her bar towel over her shoulder and turned her back to them both, already pulling a beer. “Didn’t I frow yew out of ‘ere the last time, right?”

Over the years, Pharah had come to understand Tracer perfectly well, and found herself shaking her head whenever someone expressed confusion over her colorful and rapidfire patter. That, of course, assumed that Tracer was in mixed company, which seemed to soften the hard edges of her dialect.

Entering the pub, Pharah realized they were no longer in mixed company, and the difficulty she had shown in switching her voice in Belgravia was only matched by the ease with which she slipped into the patois of the pub, faster and stronger and full of words that meant nothing like what Pharah knew.

And suddenly, Pharah was, as Tracer herself might say, at sea.

Tracer laughed. “Might ‘ave done, was completely scotch mist, might ‘ave been a bi’ of Barney round the end of the night, no reason to frow me out and leave me sat ‘ere all on me Jack Jones, innit?”

“Lucky you’re an Oxton.” She set the beer in front of Tracer and set her hand down on the worn bartop. “And as I ‘ear it, Jack’s the only girl wot ain’t never come to your door, she is.”

Tracer leaned in close to her and touched the rose against her cheek. “Give you a sov to tell me o’s rabbitting bout it. Sounds a right stunner, she does.” She grinned and gave a wink. “You ever fink of going west end, Isla? Brought this for yew, case of emergency”

Isla snatched the rose out of her hand, shook her head and stepped back toward the taps.. “Fink you’re so bloody funny, do you?”

“Well, ‘umor’s subjective, so.”

“Your old china want somefing?” She looked over at Pharah, who took a moment to register, as Tracer nudged her.

“That’d be you, love.’

“I will have whatever word means a light beer.”

Pharah looked around as she sat on the stool, studying the pictures more closely, the pub through the ages, different people smiling and laughing as they hoisted their beers. That must be the end of World War II. The Omnic crisis. There was a worn Overwatch poster, Tracer jumping across the front, snuggled against a corner. Pharah looked at all the photos and memorabilia, feeling as if she was reading an encyclopedia of this pub’s life. Her eyes fell upon a picture of several young children, a plump blonde girl pulling on the sweater of a small brunette who was climbing onto the bar, freckles exploding across her face, her eyes wide with excitement.

She looked the same, almost, although her hair was short now and her climb to the bar must be slightly less awkward, and even having seen Isla for a total of fifteen minutes she knew that it must be her tugging on the back of Tracer’s shirt. They must have known each other since they were children, living near the same places they grew up, with the same people, in their own little club in the middle of a sprawling city, tied into the very roads like an old cobblestone. Pharah couldn’t go anywhere in the neighborhood with Tracer, without someone calling “Lena!” across the street, or saying something about her family, or teasing her as they bagged up her usual order.

This was foreign to Pharah.

Mercy often talked about spending so much of her life wandering, with that sad smile on her face, the way she invited Pharah to talk about her own childhood. She rarely did. It was only in moments like this that she reflected on how much of her own childhood had been in flux. Her mother had refused to let her live with her father except in the summers, even when this meant that sometimes Pharah sat in a barrack, waiting for her to come back, or when it meant she was living with one aunt and then another, and then a friend Ana had served with, and then back in Ana’s austere apartment for the months Ana was home. Other members of Overwatch drifted in and out of her life as they moved on or died or no longer spoke to Ana. And, so the young  Fareeha Amari had become unsentimental,  well-studied, adaptable...and quite rootless.

“I think you still own that sweater.” She pointed to the photo and laughed, silence the only response.

Pharah looked to her side, but Tracer had slipped away in the brief seconds Pharah had been thinking, already at the other end of the bar talking to a grey-haired man in a snug green sweater who looked at her with a look of mock irritation and genuine affection. Her hands gestured wildly as she explained something to him, too far at the other end of the bar and too deep in her accent for Pharah to understand what she was talking about.

Pharah and Mercy were different, Pharah had often reflected, in that all Mercy had ever wanted was a place that could be her home, a consistent place that made her feel settled and warm when she entered it. It was simply that life had gotten in the way of the goal. But Pharah had been determined to carry on with her rolling sort of life, in the army and in Helix, unmoored and sailing freely, with little connection outside her comrades, all the better to be a ship of war, as an Amari was born to do.

Meeting Mercy had changed all that, and Pharah took it as a sign of her own failure to Mercy that she had never managed to give her that framed photo kind of life, the one she so obviously wanted. Alberta had been just as temporary as Cairo or Boston. And now London, just one more place these two dandelion seeds would try to sprout.

Tracer gave a percussive laugh across the pub,and one of the men playing billiards told her to keep it down, and she playfully barked back some insult and another laugh. She whirled quickly to the other side of the old man, egging him on for ideas.

Her mind turned from the faded photographs on the walls and Tracer’s popping voice to her own ideas of London, of the Overwatch headquarters, and how everything she had wanted to give to mercy, to herself, to her team, seemed to be fading away as surely as the bubbles on the top of her beer. It was silly and childish, in the way she could be sometimes, thinking that she could be the hero, and if she only applied her hard work and dedication, it would come together for her, the same as she had been made captain, the same as she had gotten her degree, the same as Pharah did everything.

She had worked so hard to have her headquarters in a major city, at a crossroads of the world, and it had meant nothing.

“Novver?” Isla looked at her with a touch of pity that did nothing to improve Pharah’s mood.

She hadn’t even realized she’d finished the beer in front of her.

“Nuff of all that,” Tracer skipped quickly around the corner of the bar, the man following behind her, and put her arm around Pharah, “Fareeha, I ‘ave solved it. Isla,” She gave a wink to the bar, “be doing this again fore too long, you ‘old on to the memories, now.”

While Pharah had been applying hard work and dedication, Tracer had brought out her own duel wield: Charm and connections.

They had put the money down that day.

It was not a fine place in a central district, as Pharah had desired. Hackney was off the beaten path, but it was cheap, and as Tracer helpfully pointed out, the office really only was about a ten minute walk from the subway. Five if you were Tracer in a fine mood.

Tracer was standing on top of her new desk, affixing a few model planes in a way Pharah felt quite certain would not have been approved of by the landlord but was not expressly forbidden by the terms of the lease, whistling merrily as she did so.

The desk was new only to Tracer herself, wood and thick and scuffed in places, one of the drawers needing the track to be reinstalled badly, but Tracer had liked it, and it had been cheap. The chair was some sort of green leather and had been delivered to the door by her uncle Mark, a few upholstery tacks missing from the edges, and cracked along the back, but something Tracer had always quite liked and was happy she’d been allowed to take. There was a box of pictures and mugs and toys slipped next to her desk, waiting for their turn to be recognized.

Pharah turned to her own desk, a sleek metal beige that had reminded her fondly of the desk she’d had in the Army, with its simple military canvas chair sitting behind it. She had a single picture of she and Mercy’s wedding day, standing under the chuppah and gazing lovingly at each other, in an angle at the corner of her desk, where she could look at it from time to time. It was simple, but it was hers, and it looked quite professional, she thought.

Tracer jumped down from the desk, prompting a yell from the chip shop below.

“Sorry!” Tracer yelled through the wood, but she looked at Pharah and giggled, her nose crinkling in delight.

Pharah looked over at her in playful annoyance. “Do not have us evicted from our new headquarters, please.”

New headquarters. As small and yellowed as it was, the words still felt powerful on her lips. Pharah had many commands over the years, of varying levels of distinction and control, but now it was so much more than that. It was the power and the responsibility of being the head of this new Overwatch, this new world, that she would make better and stronger. This small office, for whatever else it was, was where they would show their public face. Where they would allow light to shine on an operation that had too long lived in darkness.

Tracer pulled a photo from her box, large and matted in a fine wood frame. She beamed as she looked back to Pharah, grabbing the hammer off her desk and moving toward the far wall, empty and waiting.

“I dare to ask what that is.” Pharah eyed her suspiciously.

“It’s us!” Tracer flipped the picture around and showed it to her.

It was the seven of them, standing in front of the mansion door in Alberta, taken just before they’d left, crowded together on the front steps. Dva was smiling in the half way she did as Hana, the way that suggested she didn’t mean to smile but it had happened by accident. Tracer was sitting on Winston’s shoulder, a wide smile on her face, Winston’s hand resting on her legs as he shyly smiled toward the camera, holding himself smaller to better fit with the group. Jack and Ana stood at the edge of the group like two gossiping fishwives, not looking at the camera so much as the small group next to them. And Mercy. Mercy stood with her head at Pharah’s shoulder, in front of Winston, her arm around Pharah’s waist, seeming for all the world like a woman standing happily with her family, a patchwork of strange creatures who had all come together. Even Pharah herself looked pleased and relaxed.

“Thought it looked nice, ‘ad it framed.” Tracer nodded, with no need for confirmation.

The tap-tap-tap of Tracer driving the nail into the wall were like the heartbeats that had led her here, each moment popping into her mind, the places she had been, the things she had done, and the people she had met, and lost.

This neighborhood was hers now, and she would protect it, surely as she would protect the people in that photograph, her family and her team. Perhaps there was a way the wind of Pharah’s life could cease to blow. Perhaps there was light to be found in this cloudy and damp city.

Tracer stood back from the picture, hands on her hips. “Well, s’ere now.”

And perhaps there was a chance that the same soil that grew an English rose could bring a pair of dandelions into bloom.