Sombra thinks that hate is a wasted emotion. Well, all emotions are wasted, really; hers are far too strong, they overtake and overwhelm and when she was younger, she could barely breathe if one was sufficiently powerful.
She's 30 and she hates Moira.
Fear is a wasted emotion too. Useless. She'd feared the Red Eye for over half of her life but she didn't sit idly by, cower uselessly like some punk until it tracked her down and found her and ended her existence for flying too close to the sun.
She's 30 and she fears Moira.
Sombra's life is essentially a study in arrogance; how quickly a highly adaptable, intelligent mind can become complacent and think far too highly of itself. For her, apparently, it's not fucking long. She'd undergone cyborgization but even those modifications had left her scrambling, desperate. She could feel the attention the Eye had on her at all times, could feel its probes, its searches, forever trying to answer the question - Is Olivia Colomar truly gone, so easily? No. Surely not. And she knew, she knew, she would die soon if she didn't do something drastic.
So she did, she left Los Muertos behind, washed away the body paint, spoke her brief regrets and said her goodbyes and she joined (or, rather, became a highly exclusive independent contractor to Talon) - because she needed their resources. Los Muertos did fine, usually stayed in the green even, but Talon had something that any gang lacked; they were global.
And she'd needed that, desperately. And she had been such a fool. How easy was it to update Talon's laughable cybersecurity (and to her, it was all so laughably easy to break open and get at the goodies inside), how easy was it to slip inside of some high security facility aided by her invisibility and her translocators and her newfound ability to just make machines do and see and hear exactly what she wanted them to.
How easy was it to work on Moira's little projects? What an interesting exercise it was to create a biochip capable of suppressing the various and complex cascade of chemicals and neurotransmissions that could dull - perhaps even eliminate - one's ability to feel emotion. How simple, how laughable, it was to create a visor that could detect heat signatures through walls.
She'd put it all together much later when she'd seen the Widow - Amelie no longer or perhaps she was Amelie still, her talents did not lie in parapsychology - laying in a contained pool of water, hooked up to what seemed like a million cables and medical thingies she'd been too shocked to register and to search for. Moira had been cold and clinical as she'd given out little morsels of her findings, of her research. Sombra had been frozen, aghast - only 21.
"Oh, are you surprised? I suppose I forgot to tell you. How silly of me."
Moira had been amused and calculating, very easily preying on a young person's desire to prove their intellect and using that for her own ends. Sombra was, needless to say, horrified. She'd worked with the Widow already, she'd seen - the Widow was cold, so cold, and -
"Yeah." Her voice was rough and her laugh had been rougher, a half-hearted attempt to bury the depth of emotion she felt at seeing her hubris, laying still as stone in tepid water. "Guess you got me. Catch you later, gringa."
Too late, far too late. She'd very nearly ran out and she'd rushed into her quarters and she'd wept and broken things and she'd prayed to a God she didn't fully believe in for forgiveness and absolution. She'd drank far more than she should have.
And she'd woken up the next day, her head pounding, her stomach unsettled, and she'd gone to work. A mission with the Widow, how tragic. She swore a part of her died that day - the last innocent part. And nine years after the fact, the ghost of that day still haunted her.
So she hated her. And she feared her. Moira. One day, she would kill her.
