{She bruises, cough, she splutters pistol shots; But hold her down with soggy clothes and breezeblocks}

She comes to you when she hates herself.

It started awhile ago. One night she just showed up on your doorstep at an impossible hour, all nerves and a bottom lip raw from being chewed on. You had questioned then how she located your residence and insulted her foolishness for coming at all. She had only lifted her head at your words, laced with venom and agitation of being disturbed at such ungodly hours, and you remember - but cannot remember why - hesitating at the wet glisten of brown irises staring back at you.

Your pause was enough invitation for her, though you weren't sure of what until she was against you, warm body shaking and soft, trembling lips steadied against your chilled ones.

It was a surprise. It was unwelcome. It was disgusting.

You had wanted more.

It wasn't a feeling you could explain, this intense pull that gravitated you towards the British brat. Feelings were not your forte. Emotions were not your expertise. In all honestly this rush of new sensation frightened you and in an attempt to escape you had clawed your nails down her arms, hoping to inflict enough pain to startle her away.

Not unexpectedly, she yelped in shock and pain and pulled away for a brief second, lips contorted in a frown but, and to this day you still feel unnerved by it, in her eyes was some sense of...relief.

It came as a shock and yet it didn't when she surged forward to capture your lips once more with a rather pathetic whine. At the time, you considered it to be of lust or wanting.

But after many late nights where your enemy, your foil, your nuisance thrust her presence upon you without warning, each time for the same thing, you learned what it really had been.

You were not her comfort or her shoulder to cry on. You were not there to make her feel better when she was at her worst. You were never considered to be of any help, not in the positive sense.

You were her self-inflicted punishment.

It was a role you normally would've donned proudly, yet when you lay next to her after one of your regular trysts, you do not feel any satisfaction in it. The fast beating of your heart, the only time you felt an inner-warmth, a sensation of living beyond the standard breathing and eating, when you felt alive at the suffering of others...none of it.

It upsets you mildly, to feel such lack of sick joy that you receive from the torment of others, especially the annoyance that plagues you on nearly every field mission you carry out to the point where you begin to factor her in from the start. You have absolutely no problem being the one to inflict pain on her when she asks you to, to claw into smooth milky skin and leave behind angry red marks, blood collecting underneath your nails, pooling gently in the ragged cuts.

You notice that they are fresh against existing scars, pale and white, faint in the lack of light.

You find yourself asking about them one day, a slip of the tongue, curiosity unchecked. She gives you a wet laugh in response - she had been crying since you two had finished - and you feel the bed shift as she takes her arm from your midsection.

You learned that night that you were not her first method of self-harm. You would not be the last either. You were certain of that much.

After awhile you began to wonder to yourself in the nights of her absence, nights where you sat with yourself in the ringing silence of your apartment with a scalding mug in your hands, freshly brewed coffee unsipped. You wondered why Tracer allowed you to see the vulnerable side of her, to see her so unraveled and weak and pathetic. It was perfect intel to use on the battlefield if you so wished, and even more perfect to just kill her one night when she came over, to rid yourself of her and her (false) cheeriness once and for all.

You are sure she would not mind should you decide to end her life on one of those nights.

A violent shiver shakes you and in an effort to wash away the sudden chill you gulp down your coffee, the liquid burning your tongue so fiercely you rip it from your lips as tears well up in your eyes and your tongue screams. As you wait for the pain to subside and delicately pad away the tears from the corners of your eyes you try to figure out why such a thought has made you feel ill.

You do not come to a conclusion and decide to retire to bed, the coffee left sitting on your dining table.

She appears later that night, her insistent knocks rousing you from dreamless slumber. Out of habit your eyes drift to the digital clock on your nightstand and the bleary red numbers tell you that it's sometime after three AM. Not an unusual time for her to arrive, but you feel irritation flare up within you anyways as you slide out of bed and stumble across the dark room.

It is not that you hate these nights nor do you mind the late nights. But you are certainly uncomfortable with the heavy feeling in your chest and stomach when you come to realize that this is the fourth visit in the past two weeks. They've been increasing in frequency lately and you can't identify it but you know you don't like the weighty feeling that settles in and makes you feel ill at the implication of Tracer's visits. The emotion remains on the tip of your tongue, frustratingly brushing the tips of your fingers just out of reach as you unlock the padlocks on your door and open it, masking your face with indifference.

She stands there shaking in the hallway, arms clamped around her midsection. Her head is turned to the left, whipping to face you as you open the door, a paranoid look in her shimmering eyes that are dripping with tears. Her cheeks and nose are red, the skin around her eyes irritated and swollen. When you step aside to make room for her to slip in she steps forward feebly, her footwork unsteady as she nearly trips over herself in her haste to get in. It's as if she's falling apart before your eyes as she desperately tries to hold onto the pieces.

A glance at her arms - angry red welts and scratches, dried blood flaking off in spots - and that sickening weight in your stomach drops and your heart pounds heavily in your chest. You shift uncomfortably on your feet as the word comes to you finally.

Worry.

Now inside, Tracer wastes no time getting down to business. You both know why she came, so it's practically routine when her salted lips press against yours, backed with intense self-loathing and a fierce need to hurt even more. Her sorrow, a taste once so sweet and delectable, now falls bitter on your burnt tastebuds and you shudder as you pull away, the illness you feel growing.

You don't want this anymore.

Your motions feel languid as you step away, arms wrapping around yourself as you close yourself off and you almost want to throw up at the disappointment you see in her eyes. Not because you pulled away. Because she understands that you're done with this game. It takes a few seconds, but her trembling increases tenfold once it sets in and you've never seen her look so lost. Her fingers curl and uncurl, balling into fists then unraveling, her eyes boring a hole into the floor as she tries to retain some grasp on what's going on and, out of pity you wish to indulge her anyways. To be her knife, her tormentor, just so she can get some temporary peace of mind.

No. No, the thought still makes you sick, but you do know that you want her to stop.

So you decide to take a step closer. You're not sure what your course of action is as you close the distance between the two of you, a first for you to go in without a plan. But you see the wariness in her eyes as you move forward and for a short moment you once again picture herself dead by your hands, wrapped tightly around her throat. The last thing you see flicker across her eyes before they dim is gratitude.

This image spurs you forward in a rush, arms outstretched and by instinct she flinches, then freezes as your arms wrap around and pull her in, your fingers threaded through her hair, matted and greasy. Her tears soak into your night shirt, which only prompts you to squeeze her tighter.

Once she has come to terms with what is going on she begins to struggle in your grasp, quickly resorting to shouted profanities and choked insults as she demands you let go of her. You don't listen. Her sobs grow in intensity and soon enough her words become garbled. Her weight falls onto you as the last remaining strength she had gives out and she leans on you - literally and figuratively.

You are unsure of your decision, but you go to bed with a strange satisfaction, one not twisted with maliciousness, but more...flighty, you guess. Tracer lies next to you, deep in sleep, and as you study her face you begin to wonder what this means for the both of you. What all of it means.

It is later on a rooftop, scope pressed to your eye with her lined up in the sights, that you realize that for once, you have no desire to press the trigger.

A month passes without one of her nightly visits.

On one hand you feel a strange loneliness seeping in, an emotion you are all too eager to push away in favor of work. But it follows you there as well, not so keen on being ignored, when you notice that it has been four missions since you have seen Tracer out on the field. You brush the realization aside, wanting instead to revel in the peace and quiet her absence grants you, but that heavy feeling - worry, you remember with distaste - returns as you begin to wonder the reasons behind her absences.

You start to think that, with you denying her the pain she seeks, she will have resumed it herself. Perhaps, she had taken it to some extreme, going to a place not so easy to return from…

You shake the thoughts from your head with a deep-set frown. No. Surely her colleagues would have announced such a tragedy in an obituary or something of similar fashion.

Yet still you find yourself scanning the battlefield, waiting for obnoxiously bright orange to zip past you somewhere. And the worry - no, no this was more intense - grows when you do not see it.

A loud boom sounds off to your left and you whip around to locate the source. A billow of black smoke ascends past the lip of the roof you've perched yourself on, thick and opaque. Glowing embers dance in the air and you perk when you notice a bright orange glow further down. Upon closer inspection you notice a fire - you ignore the way your shoulders deflate - and the burnt ruins of one of Talon's militarized vehicles. A bouncing blue spot above catches your eye and you look down your scope to see the metal bird with rockets jetting from the scene (quite literally). You click your tongue and lean back, rolling your eyes but deciding to ignore her for now. After all, it now seems as though your team is retreating, that last blast pushing you over the top for damage.

You collapse your rifle to it's automatic form and ready your grappling hook as you step to the edge of the roof. You glance down at your team retreating in the opposite direction, watching them scramble to get away in an effort to save their own lives, a few naive and new recruits banding together in an effort to rescue any of their surviving teammates that could not physically escape themselves.

One of the groups was huddled near the flaming military vehicle, crouched next to an unmoving body, uniform mostly shredded from the explosion. You scof and made to turn away to retreat yourself, leaving the newbies to learn the hard way to leave those unable to go on behind, when you notice that the wounded man's arms were slick with blood.

Flashes of dried blood under fingernails and clotted in cuts run through your mind. Images of pale white scars, some bigger than others, decorating already pale wrists come back to you fullforce. A new image, one of blood-coated wrists, deep red pooling in upturned palms and trickling to the already large puddle on the floor…

You stumble backwards from the edge of the roof, your gun falling from your slack grip as you double over and heave, the taste of bile at the base of your throat. You do not actually throw up, but the burning in your throat and eyes is a worse experience by far. You squeeze your eyes shut and will the images away, assuring yourself that they are not real, but you cannot fight the iron grip this new emotion has on you and you feel sick, you feel sick, you feel sick.

It take a few minutes, but once you have recollected yourself enough to begin your retreat, you notice your team is long gone. You almost consider not returning with them, but you do not know what you would do otherwise.

It is later as you lie down to bed that you remember that that is what fear feels like.

She still comes to you when she hates herself.

You had just climbed into bed when you hear a faint knock on your door. Annoyance fueled the aggressive way you pulled off your covers and slammed open your bedroom door. It was late and you were tired and ill-ridden feeling of worry was constant these days. You began to dream two weeks ago and all of those dreams were filled with tear-filled brown eyes and angry red scratches that melted into cuts gushing blood.

Sleep has not been easy since.

The knock comes again and your annoyance upgrades to mild anger, so you are sure to give a fright to whoever decided to intrude on your night when you open the door…

You freeze and blink your eyes. You wonder if you are dreaming.

Tear-filled brown eyes stare back and you know that you must be.

Neither of you move or speak. Time seems to slow, or maybe it has frozen, and you wonder briefly if the device on her chest has malfunctioned in some way to be able to pull you in with it. But in that instant she blinks and tears roll down her cheeks and the spell is lifted as she rushes into your arms.

You catch her gracefully albeit still being stunned, reluctantly wrapping your arms around her thin frame and thread your fingers much like the last time you two had been in this position. Her face is buried in your chest and you can hear the muffled sniffles as she struggles not to lose herself in that moment.

You frown in disappointment but also heave a sigh of relief.

You two stand there for awhile, silent and still, until your hands fall from her head to run down her arms. Your fingers drift across the bumps of scars healed over, counting each in your head. You pull away to run your thumbs across her wrists, watching her head bend down in shame.

Nothing new.

You feel a lightness at this revelation and a small smile ghosts your face. The emotion is foreign and stiff, like a dress long neglected in the back of a closet, but wearing it again feels natural. Right.

You lift her chin with a single finger, observe her watery eyes filled with such sadness and self-hatred and you don't hesitate when you lean in to capture her lips with yours. You feel her melt into you immediately, hands gripping the front of your shirt, reeling you in like a starving fisherman.

Her lips are soft and sweet, light and feathery and you lose yourself in the pleasant texture and sensation. But the emotion behind them is still backed with repressed sorrow and self-loathing so deep it may as well have been bottomless. The bitter taste of negative emotion intermingled with the soft and sweet taste of her lips: bittersweet. You both pull away and you notice her licking her lips and cringing when she seems to notice the flavor as well.

You pull her in for more and you just can't seem to get enough.

She comes to you when she hates herself.

But now, she also comes to you when she doesn't.

And you have come to enjoy her company in either case.