Chronal Disassociation Ch. 74 (Patreon)

Sombra returned with a signed photograph and absolutely no intention of explaining how much it had cost.

“Worth it.” She said, before Lena had even asked.

“I was going to ask if you had a good time.”

“Then yes, and still worth it.”

The hacker dropped into the chair beside her, carefully setting the photograph beyond the reach of Lena’s tea. Training had finished nearly half an hour ago, although Seung-hwa was still explaining his reconstruction system to Winston at the far end of the room. The other pilots had gathered around Sombra almost immediately. Apparently, meeting somebody who sang for a living was considerably more interesting than learning how to put an exploded mech back together.

No offense to the kid, but there was only so much technical jargon that anyone could listen to in one sitting.

“LE SSERAFIM?” Hana leaned over Sombra’s shoulder, her attention fixed on the signatures. “You actually met them? Yuna, look!”

“I am looking.” Yuna had already pulled up a chair, abandoning whatever remained of her composure as squad leader to inspect the photograph, “We tried to get tickets together the last time they performed nearby, but they sold out before either of us got through.”

“Hana blamed my connection for a week.” She added, looking towards Lena.

“Because you were downloading updates!”

“We were all downloading updates.”

Lena looked between them, then down at the photograph. The name meant absolutely nothing to her, and the signatures might as well have been a set of particularly elaborate maintenance notes. She couldn’t have named a song, let alone matched any of the faces to the names Hana was now rattling off.

“Sorry, who are we talking about?”

Both girls turned towards her with expressions that suggested she had asked what a plane was.

“A K-pop group.” Yuna explained, recovering first, “We’re both fans. Half the music Hana plays in the hangar is theirs.”

“Which you keep asking me to turn up.”

“During maintenance, yes. Not during briefings.”

“Right.” Lena nodded, although she was no closer to recognising them, “I’ll take your word for it.” Maybe she’d look into them one day, when she wasn’t too busy.

“You missed the reconstruction test.” Seung-hwa told Sombra, apparently hoping to reclaim some of his audience. 

“I’ve seen the recording, niño. Very impressive. Next time, try keeping the robot in one piece.”

He looked uncertain whether that counted as criticism, but Sombra winked at him before passing the photograph to Hana. Yuna immediately leaned closer, asking what the group had been like in person, and Lena settled back with her cup. For once, both pilots looked far more interested in somebody else’s afternoon than their own performance.

This was better. They could be soldiers again after dinner.

“Oh, you got the blue version!”

Kiara appeared beside the table without warning, leaning towards the photograph with her hands behind her back. Lena nearly slopped tea down her front. Bloody hell, she was going to start charging every person capable of appearing out of nowhere for the drinks they ruined.

Sombra merely drew the photograph closer.

“Hands off.”

“They’re holographic.”

“And yet, I don’t trust you.”

Kiara pressed a hand to her chest, looking wounded. Hana laughed, and Sombra immediately returned to telling her something about the event. Nothing unusual there, then. Lena glanced towards Archer, who stood beside the doorway reviewing tomorrow’s schedule, before looking back at the AI.

She had meant to ask where Kiara had been that afternoon, but watching Archer return to the schedule brought back a rather older question. They had spent months chasing scraps of information, and now somebody who knew him had apparently been sitting inside a military training programme for long enough to become the pilots’ favourite commentator.

“How long have you been here, Kiara?” Lena asked, setting her cup down, “And I mean before we arrived, not how long you’ve been listening to us.”

Kiara turned towards her with a pleased little smile, “Awww, were you missing me?”

“I’m trying to work out why we had to walk into your simulator to find you.” Lena kept her tone conversational, although she noticed Archer looking up from his tablet, “You knew him straight away, so it’s not as though you needed an introduction.”

The pilots had quietened, Hana still holding Sombra’s photograph between her fingers. Lena hadn’t intended to stop their conversation, but she wasn’t going to pretend this was idle curiosity either. Archer had finally found somebody who could answer him, and somehow, a week later, they were still getting more information about the squad’s eating habits than what had happened to his friends.

“I didn’t know where he was.” Kiara replied, spreading her hands, “You make it sound like I left him on read.”

That was possible, Lena supposed. Archer hardly advertised himself, and half the trouble with finding him in photographs was that he could choose whether he appeared in them. Still, it answered considerably less than Kiara seemed to think.

“Alright, then why didn’t you contact Overwatch?”

“Overwatch isn’t Chaldea.”

“No, but it’s got people who investigate things most governments can’t handle. People who might have helped you look, if you’d asked.” Lena glanced towards Winston, who had set the reconstruction diagram aside, “Or were we supposed to guess that one of Archer’s old colleagues was hiding in Korea?”

“You do remember the part about Chernobog looking for me, don’t you?”

“I do.” Lena folded her hands around her cup without lifting it. She wasn’t going to dismiss that, however much the woman’s expression annoyed her, “Which is why I’m asking about contacting us privately. You’re able to order equipment into a military base without anyone noticing, but sending somebody a message would have been too risky?”

Kiara’s smile thinned slightly, “You’re assuming the person receiving it would have kept it private.”

“And you’re assuming nobody would.”

Archer set his tablet down, quietly enough that Lena only noticed because she had been watching for it. She waited for the familiar warning through their connection, some explanation of why she was poking something better left alone. None came. That didn’t necessarily mean he approved, but she was rather tired of deciding when to stop based on what she thought he might object to.

“I’m not asking you to trust everyone who wears the badge.” She continued, easing her grip before the cup could creak, “I’m asking whether you tried. You’ve had months with these kids, at least, and you’ve clearly got access to more than their training schedule. Was there really nobody you could approach?”

“You say that as though access makes people trustworthy.” Kiara tilted her head, her voice still pleasant, “Your friend is very good at finding things, Lena. Ask her whether everything she finds belongs in somebody else’s inbox.”

Sombra leaned back in her chair, “Don’t drag me into your answer.”

“Then stop giving her one for me.” Lena added before Kiara could reply, “If you didn’t think it was safe, say that. If you didn’t want our help, say that too. But you can’t keep making this sound like something we should have worked out ourselves.”

For a moment, she thought she had pushed too far. The AI looked at her without speaking, and Lena became unpleasantly aware that the nearest projector was directly above their table. She resisted the urge to glance at it.

Kiara finally lowered her hands, “And if I had contacted Overwatch, what exactly would you have wanted me to tell them?”

“What you knew. What you needed.” Lena heard the impatience in her own voice, but kept going, “A warning would’ve been a bloody good start.”

Across the table, Archer had gone very still.

Kiara looked towards him, then back at her, and the smile returned.

“You’re getting awfully worked up over a hypothetical.” Kiara said, her smile widening as though they were sharing a joke, “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

Lena had an answer ready before she knew what it was, which was probably a good reason to keep her mouth shut for a moment. She hadn’t come into the room intending to interrogate anyone. Half an hour ago, her most pressing concern had been whether they could get through tomorrow’s drills without Hana turning the warm-up into a competition. Now she was sitting forward in her chair, arguing with somebody who could apparently run most of the country’s defences, and she wasn’t entirely sure when that had become a reasonable use of her afternoon.

It wasn’t as though Kiara had suddenly changed. The jokes, the exaggerated pouting, the way she turned almost every question into an opportunity to annoy whoever had asked it; Lena had watched all of that for a week. She had even laughed at some of it, especially when Archer was on the receiving end. So why was the same bloody smile making her want to demand an answer that she wasn’t even certain Kiara owed her?

“You are.” She replied eventually, “That doesn’t really answer anything I asked.”

Archer shifted beside the doorway, drawing her attention despite how little he actually moved. He wasn’t looking at the schedule anymore. He was watching Kiara with the same patient concentration Lena had seen whenever somebody offered him a possible lead, waiting to find out whether there was anything useful beneath the nonsense.

Perhaps that was part of it.

She had become so used to Archer looking for things that she’d stopped noticing the effort involved. He would disappear, return with some new complication, then start again somewhere else. Even when she was furious with him, even when he deserved it, she had never seriously doubted that he was trying. Their argument over New Mexico had been about how he’d gone about it, and who he’d involved, because of course the stubborn bastard had managed to make a perfectly understandable concern into something she wanted to throttle him over.

None of that meant he hadn’t been doing his damned hardest to find a way forward.

“Lena?”

She looked back at Kiara, who had tilted her head in an imitation of concern that might have worked better if she hadn’t been smiling throughout it. Lena opened her mouth, then hesitated as another memory intruded: Archer outside on the walkway, explaining why a friend wouldn’t be coming back. He had sounded almost embarrassed to still be upset when she found him.

Kiara had delivered that news between jokes.

Lena hadn’t forgotten, exactly. She’d simply been busy with the drills, with making sure the pilots ate, with deciding how to check on Archer without making him feel watched. Somewhere along the way, she had apparently filed her irritation beside everything else she could deal with later, until hearing Kiara make another game of answering him had brought rather more of it back than she’d expected.

That didn’t make every suspicion fair. Kiara had lost people too, presumably, and Lena knew next to nothing about what surviving had cost her. She couldn’t demand that the woman look miserable before she was willing to believe it had hurt.

But she was beginning to think she could ask her to stop treating Archer’s questions as entertainment.

“I don’t know what you’ve been dealing with.” Lena said, more slowly this time, “And I’m not pretending he’s easy to work with. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of practice.”

Archer’s eyebrow rose, but she continued before he could offer a contribution.

“But he’s been trying to work this out since before most of us even understood what he was looking for. You knew him before any of us did. Surely you can see how much this matters to him?”

Kiara glanced past her again. This time, Lena didn’t follow.

“If there’s something you can’t tell him, then tell him that.” She continued, “Just stop making him sit through another bloody performance to find out whether you’re going to help.”

“Oxton.” Archer finally stepped away from the doorway, drawing her attention before she could find another reason to keep talking, “While I appreciate the defence, you’re not going to get a straight answer by giving her more opportunities to wind you up.”

Lena glanced towards Kiara, whose expression did very little to contradict him. That was irritating in itself, although she supposed proving his point by starting again wouldn’t help.

“So we just leave it?”

“No. But I can ask my own questions.” He pulled out the chair beside her and sat down, rather than retreating towards the door as she’d half expected, “And you needn’t make them about me to justify asking yours. You’re involved in this whether either of us likes it.”

That took some of the argument out of her. She hadn’t thought she needed his permission, exactly, but somewhere between asking about Overwatch and getting angry on his behalf, she had apparently forgotten that she wanted answers for herself as well.

Archer turned towards Kiara, “We’ll speak after dinner. Start with what happened after Olympus, and work forward. If there are things you won’t discuss, say so, and we can stop wasting time trying to guess which question you’ll actually answer.”

“Such a demanding invitation. Should I prepare slides?”

“A chair will suffice.”

Kiara studied him for a moment before giving a small, almost ordinary shrug, “Fine. After dinner.”

Lena waited until the conversation around them cautiously resumed before reaching for her cold tea. She wasn’t sure whether she’d helped or simply made the afternoon uncomfortable for everyone, and Archer had already picked up his tablet again.

‘Sorry if I made a bit of a mess of it.’

“Only a bit?”

She gave him a look. His mouth twitched, although the reply that followed through their connection was quieter.

“Thank you, Oxton. I mean that.”

Lena looked down at her cup, suddenly finding very little to complain about. She could accept that much without making him regret saying it.

‘You’re not having that conversation without me, though.’

“I assumed as much.”

Good. This time, she intended to hear the answers.

…