Sombra Online

Five Times Sombra Lost her Family, and the One Time she Saved Them.

What should I be doing? Something productive. What am I doing? Making myself cry while writing this.

I hope you're ready for angst and pain, because that's the only thing in this chapter. Well, that and Sombra's strange insults.

The first time Sombra lost her family, she was Olivia.

Some of the details were fuzzy, others seemed to be perfectly recorded in Sombra's memory, replaying over and over, like some sad form of torture.

She couldn't remember the date. Her Mama's and Papa's last words to her were a mystery as well. What she had for dinner, the weather, all erased from her mind.

Everything else, though? It was all still there.

The smell of blood, so thick and metallic that Olivia could barely breathe. The gunshots, loud, loud, loud, making her ears ring and ring until she couldn't even hear her own screams. The blood leaking from her parents' corpses, staining the carpet until the red seemed to burn Olivia's irises, and she had to look away. The cramps from being stuffed into a closet, a desperate attempt by her parents to keep her safe from the attacking Omnics.

The closet kept her hidden, but sometimes, she wished it hadn't.

0o0o0

The second time Sombra lost her family, she was Sofia's Daughter.

No one could remember her name. How could they? Her tias tried to take care of everyone, but there were too many kids wandering around the little makeshift orphanage. Too many hungry stomachs to feed. With all of that, how could they be expected to remember her name? Olivia didn't care. It felt nice, being referred to as Sofia's Daughter. It kept a little bit of her Mama alive.

She had stayed there for five months, enough time to lull her into a false sense of security. So it caught her off guard when the building exploded. Olivia was playing in the yard when the attack happened. How could the Omnics resist a house full of defenseless children? All it took was one bomb for the building to go.

It was all too familiar; the screaming, the smell of blood, the ringing in her ears. And the pit of dread in her stomach, the pain of losing another family.

The fire brigade showed up quickly, but they couldn't save a building that was already gone. They couldn't save lives that were already lost.

Once again, Olivia was the only one to survive. And once again, she sometimes wished she hadn't.

0o0o0

The third time Sombra lost her family, she was Kid Number 23.

It was a real orphanage this time, but the conditions weren't much better. If anything, they were worse. Hundreds of kids were stuffed in the building, all of them hungry, but there was never enough food to feed them all. Several had already died of starvation.

Their names had been taken away. Reduced to a number so the staff could keep track of them all. Olivia was 23. The numbers were tattooed on to her wrist, along with a barcode. They would scan it every day, so they could make sure she was only fed once. If they tried to give the children three meals a day, they would run out of food far too soon. So everyday, she got a piece of bread and a bruised apple. It was enough. (It had to be.)

Olivia's senses were sharp, which is why she could smell the smoke before anyone else. Warning others was fruitless. They paid her no attention, chalking it up to the overactive mind of a child.

By the time they found out she was right, it was too late.

Olivia had long since run from the building. Curled up in an alleyway a mile away, she hoped the smell of smoke would not reach her. It didn't. But she knew the building was gone. The people around her whispered about it. It was started by one of the staff, they said. Valencia Diaz. She had set fire to the building, because they had run out of food, and a quick death from a fire would be better than the slow death of starvation. It was a noble act, if a little misguided.