The Refuge (Overwatch)
Chapter One
Abigail
The fluorescent lights of Matty’s General Store hummed with a low, relentless buzz that made the inside of Abigail Grace’s skull ache.
She gripped the red plastic handle of her shopping cart, her knuckles white, grounding herself in the cold, hard reality of the metal.
Breathe in for four seconds. Hold for four.
Out for four. The rhythm, a desperate holdover from a life she had set fire to three weeks ago, barely made a dent in her racing pulse.
Abby stared blindly at a shelf of canned peaches.
She was thirty years old, fifteen hundred miles away from the concrete jungle of her past, and completely out of her depth now in the actual jungle at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains.
But the Montana wilderness in the dead of July could be the cure.
Out there, the pines didn't demand explanations, and the mountains didn't ask her why she had shattered into a million pieces right in the middle of a Tuesday morning acquisitions meeting. Out there, she just had to survive.
She tossed three cans of peaches into a cart that already looked like the punchline to a bad survivalist joke: a dozen boxes of waterproof matches, three bright blue plastic tarps, a hatchet that looked much too heavy for her wrists, forty packets of instant oatmeal, a pair of Carhartt overalls that were two sizes too large, and a first-aid kit featuring SpongeBob and Patrick on the front of the box.
She had been a Girl Scout. She knew how to pitch a tent. She knew how to build a fire.
What she didn't know was how to stop her hands from shaking. Fifteen hundred miles and two days away from Los Angeles, and they were still trembling just like they were when she threw a bunch of miscellaneous clothing into her duffle bag and walked out of her million dollar LA apartment.
Abby moved stiffly into the next aisle and began to browse.
Her eyes dropped to a large can of bear repellent sitting on the shelf, her heart stuttering in her chest. Bear repellent?
! She covered her face with her hands, leaning heavily on the cart handle, her leg muscles that had already been trembling for the past two days suddenly feeling as if they were melting away from within.
She had lost her mind. What was she doing?
Her final moments in the boardroom flashed through her mind: her heart rate so high she could hear it in her ears, the pain in her chest feeling as if someone was breaking her ribs one by one, the look on her fiancé David’s face as he rolled his eyes from across the table at her.
The colorful PowerPoint she had her staff make displayed on the one-hundred-inch flat screen at the front of the room seemed to mock her with its perfection. Her hands dropped from her face.
She was right where she needed to be. Bears were easier than corporate acquisitions.
David’s sudden voice in her head put her teeth on edge. I’ve never met a single VP of Corporate Acquisitions who showed more weakness than you do. Suck it up, buttercup. Everyone has to in order to get anywhere in this world.
She felt her heart rate climb again, and the sudden lack of air in her lungs had it rising even further. She squeezed her eyes shut. Not here. Please. Breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four.
Will
Three aisles over, Will Hammond was meticulously comparing the tensile strength of two different brands of nylon rope when he heard the sharp, frantic clatter of cans hitting the linoleum floor.
He didn't flinch. Four years of off-grid living at The Refuge hadn't dulled his instincts; it had only refined them. Will set the rope down, his calloused hands brushing against the worn denim of his jeans, and stepped around the endcap to see what had happened.
A woman was crouched on the floor, frantically gathering up a spilled pyramid of canned fuel.
Will’s eyes, a piercing, stormy grey, took her in with the clinical precision of a former Navy SEAL Corpsman. It was a habit he couldn't break—triaging the world around him.
Assessment 1: She was flushed, a sheen of nervous sweat on her brow despite the blast of the store's air conditioning.
Assessment 2: Her gear was all wrong. Designer sneakers, paired with lightweight, athletic wear. She looked like she had escaped a Beverly Hills hot yoga studio ten minutes before the end of class.
Assessment 3: The erratic, breathless way she was tossing the cans into her cart practically screamed systemic exhaustion and adrenaline overload. Flight response.
She was running from something, and she was running blindly.
Will closed the distance between them, his heavy boots making no sound on the scuffed floor. "Let me give you a hand with that," he said, keeping his voice deliberately low and pitched to soothe. The same voice he used to use when holding pressure on a teammate's bleeding wound in the dark.
The woman jolted, her head snapping up. Her eyes were wide, a startling shade of hazel ringed with dark circles of profound sleep deprivation.
For a second, Will felt a strange, sharp tug in his chest. It was a familiar, heavy ache: the ghost of failures past, the weight of people he couldn't save.
But beneath that, there was something new.
"I'm fine," she said quickly, her voice a fragile, raspy thing. "I've got it. It was just a slip."
Will crouched down effortlessly, keeping a respectable distance so he didn't crowd her space, and picked up the last two cans. He held them out to her, his large, scarred hands steady.
"Cans can be slippery," he offered mildly, his face an impassive mask of calm. "You stocking up for a weekend trip? Or are you heading up into the deep woods?"