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Sometimes when Ana closes her eyes, she finds herself alone in the desert, holding her arm over her eyes to shield them as she trudges through a relentless sandstorm. She doesn’t remember how she got here or what she’s really looking for— it’s just her on her own braving conditions that would kill anyone, trying to survive the sand whipping at her cheeks and climbing up to her knees.
Then she sees a figure in the distance. It’s not always the same figure, and sometimes it’s more than one, but she always knows exactly who it is from the blurry form of their profile, and no matter what, she always gets the nagging sense that she’s running out of time.
The first time she ever has the dream is three months after Fareeha was born. It’s the night before her first mission back with the army after having her, and she’s trying to figure out how to feel about the fact that she’s happy to be back. She’s glad to be working and putting herself on the line for the greater good, even when she could just as easily have a simple life raising her daughter with her husband.
As Ana pushes through the wind and sand, she can make out Sam’s form in the distance with Fareeha cradled in his arms. Even with the relentless wind blowing sand across the dunes, he’s casual and relaxes as he gently rocks her back and forth, as if he hasn’t registered the threat of the storm.
She starts running, just so she can warn him and save them both. When she gets closer, she can hear him humming softly to her, the same song that she danced with him to at her wedding.
It feels like eons before she finally reaches him and when she does, the hand she tries to set on his shoulder goes right through it as her husband and her daughter crumble into sand that slips through her fingers.
Crying, she collapses to the ground and tries to pull the sand to her chest but the wind keeps blowing it away. No matter what she does, she cannot protect them, she cannot keep herself from losing them.
Every night until she returns home, that dream haunts her sleep. Sometimes it’s both of them, sometimes it’s just Sam, and on the hardest nights, it’s only Fareeha, abandoned alone in the desert. Even in her wakefulness, she’s filled with this aching feeling that if she had just run a little faster or tried a little harder, she could have saved them. But she never can. She can fight and fight but she can never save the two people who matter most to her.
When she’s home, she’s consumed with guilt for not having saved them, but she tries. She tries to balance being a soldier with being a mother and even though it consumes her, she doesn’t say anything. Her work is too important and she loves her family too much. She can’t sacrifice either, so she must sacrifice herself.
Overwatch feels like an answer once the Omnic Crisis ends, but it’s not. It’s harder than ever to hold together the shattered pieces of her life and pretend that they make up a whole.
She tries to bring the two together for her own sake, raising her daughter around Overwatch to show her this part of her life and teach her how to protect herself. Secretly, she hopes that when she’s older, she will see something that pushes her away from this life, the one that Ana loves so much despite what she’s endured, the one that has destroyed her. But even when she’s young, it’s clear that Fareeha will do whatever she wants, no matter what influences linger around her.
Sam hates it. He wants to go back to Canada and raise their daughter there where she can be shielded from the conflicts plaguing the world and grow up like most other kids do. Ana doesn’t think it would make a difference and she selfishly wants her daughter in her arms, even if that means raising her on an Overwatch base. She wishes that Fareeha could take after her father but every time she looks at her and sees that fierce determination in her eyes, it’s like she’s looking at her own reflection.
When Fareeha is a young teenager, the growing distance and ongoing argument about how to raise her leads to Ana and Sam’s divorce. He takes her back to Canada even though all she wants to do is stay at the base and learn more about how to fight. Ana wants a better life for her and despite having fought to have her with her before, she lets him take her to another continent to live a life away from Overwatch. Fareeha hates her for it.
Just like that, her husband and daughter slip through her hands in the same way that she had nightmares about. She had loved them, she had tried, but it was never enough to keep them from becoming sand between her fingers.
On her next mission, she goes to the Watchpoint in Gibraltar. On the day before she leaves to come back to headquarters, she dances with Reinhardt until dawn, threading her fingers through his soft blond hair and leaning her head against his big, stable chest.
When they finish dancing, they do something that she should probably regret. It’s the first time that she’s felt like herself in years.
For the next few years, the dream is the same: she loses Fareeha every night until one day she sees two figures in the distance arguing heatedly and painfully unaware of the wind whipping around them. From the shape of their forms and the distant shouting voices, she knows that it’s Jack and Gabriel.
It’s the same story: she runs as fast as she can to meet them but it’s never fast enough. She watches them tear each other apart until they’re nothing but sand in the wind. She can’t do anything to stop them from destroying each other, and watching them do it night after night destroys her too.
This version of the dream feels a little more like a glimpse at reality. She can feel everything falling apart around her and there’s nothing she can do. Her two best friends drift further and further apart and the bite of their arguments carries more and more malice, like they’ve forgotten how much their friendship had always meant, like they’ve both forgotten that it means a lot to her too.
In fact, it’s as if they have forgotten her entirely. As Overwatch is destroyed, they destroy themselves too. Everyone draws into themselves as the organization falls apart. Even Reinhardt with his endless positivity and showstopping smile falls quiet in those final days. There’s no life in any of it anymore— all that’s left of Overwatch is burning anger, aching sadness, and bitter disappointment.
In the end, everything falls apart under her fingertips just like in the dream.
Eventually, it becomes obvious that no matter what she does, she can’t keep anyone. Everything is destined to fall apart and everyone is destined to leave.
The next time she finds herself in that endless desert, she turns the other way and runs. It feels like the right decision.
After all, when you’ve already sacrificed so much of yourself, it’s not hard to become someone else.