Lena Oxton was often viewed as the cheeky heartthrob by many of her teammates, oblivious to her or otherwise.

And was she ever charming. Unintentionally so, most of the time.

Her bright smile, her freckles, her expressionate eyes; the ways she would demonstrate chivalry to women in trouble, the ways that she would always prioritize those in need above herself - everything about the entity of Tracer was one that both society and her peers alike adored. She was integral to every team, the key to a despondent society’s growth and safety, and above all else, she was the love of Emily Oxton’s life, and that, to Tracer, mattered above everything else in the world to her.

One particular wintry morning is when the nostalgia hits her the very most.

It’s as though time comes to a grinding halt in the best way. And the moment itself isn’t had on any real day of significance, or because of a grand gesture or a particular event. Her mind just decides to remind her that hey, this is your life, Lena, as the familial sound of Emily watching re-runs of old shows on the telly next door hits her ears, asking if she wanted to come and snuggle up with her on the sofa to warm up the place.

This moment, the moment where the reality of Tracer’s life hits her full in the face – she’s here, she’s able to wake up every morning and kiss her wife – is one that she wants to keep recalling endlessly, feeling the shaky, emotional sensation of happy tears welling up in her throat, but she manages to keep her composure as she pours the morning coffee, tells herself to stop being daft and get a bloody grip.

But this was her life. Even with the Chronal Accelerator, it was everything she ever wanted. She had built something so wonderful around her with the help of someone that she adored, cherished, loved more than anything else in this world; a certain redhead with a smile to kill; and then there was the sheer joy her everyday life brought her, even outside of Emily’s existence.

The fun her and Winston had on missions, the tingle of excitement she would feel when she was given tasks she knew she could accomplish with ease, and the relieved, satisfyingly tired ache that she felt when she would come home, her lips pining to be placed on Emily’s.

There were so many reasons every day for Tracer to smile, and there wasn’t a day that went by where she wasn’t grateful for Emily’s smile, her beautiful hair, the laugh she’d give after hearing about the silly events of Tracer’s day. She thanked her lucky stars that she had such an intelligent and kind friend in Winston too, after he was able to root her in place with her anchor of choice.

But it hadn’t always been this way.

Tracer laughs to herself in the kitchen, still in her nostalgic moment, surrounded by the scent of coffee beans and the sound of laptop keys clicking in the other room, when she remembers the history of her and Emily.

Emily and Tracer had met first when they were just seventeen.

Both women lived on opposite sides of London. Tracer can barely remember the situation that led to the two of them meeting, especially as teenagers who didn’t go to the same school. But before long, they had exchanged contact details, and; after the midnight conversations about music and the future and animals; Tracer knew she had an incredibly huge crush, with one small problem – and that was that Emily was not only already with someone else, but that Tracer was constantly failing in school, which often led to her right to go out being taken away by her parents.

“You’re going to fail all your exams at this rate, Lena!” her mother would say. “And the school said they’ll suspend you if you don’t dye your hair back to brown! Honestly, can’t you just behave for another few months? What happens if you decide you want to change careers later down the line?”

“Aw, rubbish!” Tracer would reply, and her mother would sigh into her hands. “I don’t need bloody school to be in a band anyway, you daft old sod!”

Tracer gulped and buttoned her lip after that; unmeaning to say quite what she did so rudely; and her mother would give her the stern, unwanted look, of you just try that one more time that they both knew so well.

Tracer knew not to push it despite her teen punk ways, and used all of her time that she wasn’t allowed to gallivant around either playing her guitar or daydreaming of Emily. She found that the two often coincided well.

She found solace in her teen angst over a girl. She knew many other women that did the same over their crushes, who were either a little older or younger than her at the time. She would long for the day that Emily would break up with her no-good girlfriend, who Tracer had often offered to beat up on multiple occasions to Emily, despite being smaller and less strong than her. Emily would always laugh and brush it off as a joke, but Tracer knew full well that she was being serious.

“It’s alright, Lena, but thanks.” Emily would reply when they walked through the park together, and Tracer felt pangs of her crush beating at her heart like a drum. “We just have arguments sometimes…I suppose every couple has to at some point, right?”

“You deserve better, Emily.” Tracer blurted out, and she remembers Emily looking at her in a different light for the first time that day. “She doesn’t know a good thing when it’s right in front of her.”

Emily and Tracer hold hands as they stand in the middle of the path; not as they walk, but instead because Tracer had taken hold of both of Emily’s hands rather boldly, and was stroking her knuckles with her thumbs as she looked down at the ground.

The sky was a deep shade of summer violet, the coming night illuminated only by the pathway’s street lamps, glowing cobalt blue in the evening; and Emily was blushing, almost as red as her hair, as she cleared her throat.

“Oh! Th-thanks, Lena…” she mumbled with an irremovable grin, before Tracer looks up at her with a quizzical look at her tone.

“Oh!” She began to realize, and the two broke apart like an electric shock. Tracer found that day that a blushing face is even more noticeable with dyed white hair, and Emily giggled. “Uh, sorry…”

“No…it’s okay.” Emily replied with a shy grin, and chuckled quietly. “Thank you, Lena. You’re so kind to me all the time, you know.”

Tracer remembers how she giggles, just as shy as Emily’s beautiful, picture-perfect grin, and rubs the back of her half-shaved head.

“Well, I gotta treat a beautiful girl like you right, haven’t I?”

“You really are too charming for your own good, aren’t you?” Emily laughs, and blushes all over again. Tracer grins, knowing that she’s making headway in the heart of the only girl she’s got eyes on, and prays extra hard that night that the news they’ll break up comes in even sooner.

The prayers paid off.

Within a week of that meeting occurring, Emily had broken it off with her good for nothing ex, and Tracer found herself skipping to the bus every morning.

At Emily’s eighteenth birthday was where they had their first kiss, a few months later.

They had met up and hung out almost constantly after Emily had become single again; and, despite Tracer’s punk appearance back then, usually consisting of shredded leggings, leather jacket, and her first upper ear piercing alike, Emily’s parents welcomed her. Tracer had never experienced happiness in such a way than when she got to be around this woman. She longed to be able to wake up next to Emily’s flame-red hair every morning, to be able to stroke at her freckles as she slept that little bit longer. As a young woman approaching her late teens, she was not at that level of boldness to quite do that yet; but Tracer had the correct feeling, even back then, that she would be able to eventually.

And she was right.

The first time they slept together is a memory that Tracer thinks on semi-often, even without the nostalgic blast of their first meetings and their rather grand history of crushing on each other through the ages. But Tracer remembers it so well, remembers the way that Emily’s lips first felt on her neck, and how desperately horny the entire encounter had made her at that age.

Eighteen; a year where many things are changing for the average person. Tracer knew it, and so did Emily. Tracer had re-sat some of her exams; her hair now a faded brown from her bleached white; and her second ear piercing sat comfortably atop the first. She had done well, this time around, and Emily had taken her out to a bar with some friends; but as both of them found, the curiosity of their honeymooning was always an ever present urge – their texts and messages across various platforms to each other could attest to that – and was finally coming to boiling point.

Their friends were distracted on the dancefloor when they both began to realize how hard lust was hitting them. Emily had been shifting all night; Tracer had been trying not to let her head spin over seeing the woman she already felt unmeasurable amounts of lust for in a skin-tight black dress, with flimsy strings and faux gold chains holding the material’s back together over her skin.

Emily had been smirking, very smugly, she might add, as Tracer’s hands began to wander a little in the car on the way there; and Emily hadn’t made any attempt to dissuade her, but instead kissing at the tops of Tracer’s piercings, mumbling with a smile about her voice just how much she couldn’t wait to be alone with her all night after. Tracer crossed her legs.

Tracer felt her hands instinctively trying to reach underneath Emily’s thighs, before both of them remembered where they were to one of their friends saying “get a bloody room, you two” before they stopped and giggled quietly.

The first time they are alone in that night is at the bar. The neon was hovering in the lights above the dark blue; golds and purple swirled amidst the mist of the floor, and the thumping boom of basslines as the night went on. Tracer and Emily were sat in a booth far from the immediate dancefloor; amidst other couples that clearly had the same idea, despite that their vision of them was relatively obscured; and it wasn’t long before the two women realized they couldn’t wait any longer.

Tracer felt Emily’s hands run up into her hair between whispers, stroking at her chestnut, soft spikes, and the pang of lust had hit between her legs hard. Emily’s breath was hitching as they kissed with fervour, enthusiastic, passionate kisses which drove Tracer even wilder; with Emily’s legs draped across her lap.

“You should be straddling me,” Tracer mumbled against the shell of Emily’s ear, and letting her own hands stroke against the skin of her lover’s back. “It’s not fair to tease a girl like this, you know?”

Emily giggled, and leant back a little; biting her lip with a bright, cheeky smile that Tracer knew so well, before moving Tracer’s hands to rest atop both of her thighs.

“I think we need to go somewhere a little more private, don’t you, Lena?”

“I’ve thought that all bloody night, love. You know we didn’t have to come here. You’re always more than enough for me.”

Emily always felt the overwhelming sensation of being unbearably turned on overcome her at the sound of Tracer’s voice huskily dipping, a melody against her ears; and naturally, as did Tracer in regards to being horrendously turned on, who felt her head swirling in a pool of undiluted desire amidst the beats of the bar; and almost as speedily as the current time, where Tracer does have the help of an Accelerator, they were gone and in between the sheets of Lena’s bed before they realized it.

Their first time was much better than Tracer had thought.

She had never thought it would be bad, but she had never slept with anyone besides Emily, and had just kind of assumed that it would probably be a bit of a mess; clumsy, or rushed, or something. But it flowed so well. So damn well that they went a second and attempted a third round before they collapsed laughing and out of breath.

It was the first time Tracer had quite experienced the myriad of feelings and emotions that sex brought with it; the sensations of Emily’s lips dragging against her skin, her touch between her legs, wet fingertips, strong palms; the scent of Emily’s perfume, the shampoo in her gorgeous hair, and the sounds of her pleasure when Tracer touched her, felt her, kissed her, god, did anything to do with just holding onto her skin in the moment. Emily’s moans were like nectar to Tracer’s ears when they had sex, and once she had a taste of her lover’s lust for her, she instantly wanted more.

And as they got older, the better sex became. Tracer would long for days to be over just to feel Emily’s touch. The more familiar they became with each other’s bodies, the most sensitive areas of skin, the positions, the places. The way Emily would love Tracer to ride on top of her, thighs clenching either side of her hips; the way that Tracer would press Emily up by her front, hot against the walls of their apartment, with moans and lapsed breaths panting against Tracer’s neck whenever she leant back; there were an innumerable amount of moments where Emily and Tracer knew each other, intimately and eternally, inside and out.

There were, of course, the most terrible of moments in their relationship, but Tracer was more than happy to recognize and be relieved that none of them were to do with arguments. And it frustrated her so to think of such a time, because it had all started out so well.

Her and Emily, as far as relationships went, were incredibly happy almost all of the time, and thoroughly enjoyed just being around each other; so when the news came in that Tracer was in deep, deep trouble, lost somewhere in a painful time-space continuum, Emily crumpled in Winston’s arms, begging him to do something, anything, to get her back.

Tracer doesn’t like to think about how being lost in the middle of time and space felt. It felt like the worst kind of reality, where her existence meant nothing, and where she herself didn’t even have an existence to begin with. Everything she had worked for; her relationship, her pilot status, her dreams and hopes; gone. Lost into this never-ending void, with no hope of getting out.

The same thoughts tortured her. I’m sorry, Emily. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t be more careful.

By the time Winston had pulled her out, two weeks had gone by.

Emily was there, waiting with bloodshot eyes, raggy red sweater unremoved from the sheer anxiety than she had been swimming in, and Winston was much the same. Tracer was laying on the floor next to a flashing, static blue bubble, held up by what looked like flimsy metal and tape, with Winston drying his eyes on his sleeve.

“Welcome back.” He mumbled with a grin, as though nothing had changed.

Emily was a mess of tears and dark eyes, removing the hands that had been stuck over her mouth and holding Tracer tighter than she could ever remember being held, kissing at her forehead and her face repeatedly.

“Blimey,” Tracer began weakly through her emotion, laying in a tearful Emily’s arms. “You’re looking as beautiful as when I first left you, aren’t you?”

“You handsome devil!” Emily exclaimed with a laugh, and crying as she held Tracer close. “I missed you more than I could bear! Don’t you ever do that again!”

Tracer knew she was home.

And that was always the best part of every day that followed – home.

The two months following Tracer’s recovery, they got married. Emily was the one who proposed. Tracer wept with tears of joy, and the two also laughed hysterically as Tracer herself pulled out a ring. It seemed as though the thought had been on the both of their minds after the ordeal.

The ceremony was beautiful, and everything that they had dreamed of.

Emily looked so beautiful in white. Tracer had always thought that Emily looked the best in colours that brought out the deep, vivid red of her hair, and the gorgeous white smile that she brought with her everywhere she went. Tracer almost cried when she saw how beautiful her bride to be was, waiting at the bottom of the path to the altar, hanging on Winston’s arm as he gave her away; with their friends in the Overwatch group in the surrounding areas of the church. Or the ones that could make it, anyway.

Tracer had always, always wanted to marry Emily, from the moment their eyes met. Through everything, Emily was her rock. It was nothing short of a pleasure to be able to call this woman her own, officially, fully, and eternally even moreso than before. Their honeymoon to Nepal was more beautiful than either of them could imagine, and with a reliable guide in the form of Zenyatta, it was made even better during the days they wanted to look around and not lay in bed kissing the hours away.

With these nostalgic memories in mind, Tracer thought, as she finally poured the coffee she had been stalling on in the kitchen all this time, it was no wonder the emotion hit her like a bolt out of the blue.

She was a very lucky woman, even if the Accelerator was the reason she was able to experience it all; and, as she re-entered the living room to curl up next to the love of her life, kissing her on the lips with a hand on each cheek, she beamed; with Emily returning the favour.

Tracer – Lena Oxton – in those moments, always, with firm resolve, knew that this was exactly why she was put on this earth.

To save all of her time for those that she loved; for as long as time would let her be here.