Chapter Text
It takes about a week, but Reaper comes to the conclusion that he is not Jack Morrison – as far as he can tell.
Jack Morrison is a name that’s blacked out on Talon’s network and equipment, so finding a photo of the man is impossible at this point unless he gets away. It’s also a name that sounds like it belongs on the cover of a mystery novel or in a newspaper article about the decline of man-operated tractors.
Despite the fact that he’s been wearing a dog tag bearing that name, his doubts are strong enough to not elicit any real anxiety about it. It’s more of an unenthusiastic disappointment that his list of possible identities continues to shrink at a glacial pace. But – he does get curious enough to finally risk a glance in a mirror.
What stares back at him is unrecognizable. It’s person-like, just going by what he’s seen in others. Reaper isn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but if encountered by someone he most likely could be identified as an embodiment of something that was definitely human at some point. Probably. Maybe an echo of someone who once might have been handsome. Maybe.
Absolute confusion keeps his eyes on the monster in the mirror. What was supposed to be a quick glance turns into a full-blown existential crisis as he stares wide-eyed, trying to piece together who he could possibly be. It’s like trying to see a picture through the static on a television, bits and pieces triggering waves of recognition but never quite enough to bring the full picture.
He curls a hand against his thigh. The other goes to his face, running along his jaw where patches of hair still seem to grow around the gaping hole by his mouth. Those teeth that show through are bone-white. His skin is a deep, dark color under dusty gray, a sickly sheen cast on it by the glowing light above the sink.
Looking at himself in the eyes brings on a wave of nausea so strong he turns away and retches into a small waste bin. What comes up is like tar, pitch-black and sticking to the back of his throat. His concept of disgusting is abstract at best, so all that passes through his mind as he grips the wire basket hard enough to dent and chokes back more bile is the obvious thought that he was never supposed to look at himself so closely. Pieces of his face still filter through but most of it is gone, ejected from his mind so forcefully it inspires a raging migraine.
He stumbles to the tub and collapses over the rim, sinking down until his spinal cage shrieks against the porcelain. He twists, maneuvering his large body well enough to reach over and turn on the faucet.
A shower of frigid water rains down on him and shocks him into intense focus, driving away the migraine just enough to calm him down. He lets out the breath he’s been holding for two weeks and closes his eyes, condemns the weight of the tags against his chest, the cold metal a comfort as well as a horrible annoyance.
When he comes to there’s a person in the doorway to the bathroom.
Widowmaker’s lithe silhouette barely moves at any given time, belying her grace and hustle in a firefight, but now she’s damn near statuesque, chest still with lungs that rarely breathe and a heart that beats about once a minute. He’s still lounging in his compression suit, soaked to the bone, looking however it is he looks to make her stare down at him neatly disinterested – a rare absence of pity – before leaving silently.
He wishes, God damn it, he wishes she would have said something to him. The quiet horror of feeling hollowed out amplifies tenfold when faced with someone who’s even emptier than that. In that long moment of staring at each other he wanted to scream. What it might have done to him for her to reach down and help him up is a rope tightening around his neck.
It’s a sensation of misery so ironclad it feels like he’s sinking, yet he struggles to claim ownership to it. It’s discomfort and guilt growing thick roots in his stomach that take a stab at him every time he looks at her and sees nothing staring back, yet he can recall no events that could have inspired it. He simply woke up one day, saw her for the first time, and knew the deepest trenches of an implacable grief that hovers over him like an angry god.
What he felt when he looked in the mirror – not so different than that.
He pushes that thought down, leans back against the tile and decides he doesn’t look like a Jack Morrison.
*
Gabriel has his hands up above his shoulders, looking down at Jack’s head and trying to decide where to strike first. “I can’t believe this,” he says for the third time in two minutes.
Jack tips his head back and frowns. “I’m being very vulnerable right now, can you at least try to take it seriously?” He’s sitting in his underwear with a towel around his shoulders. Vulnerable might be a word for it, if they both weren’t so jacked on what Gabriel still jokes are glorified steroids.
An incriminating box disgraces the wastebasket and there’s a streak of bleach-white dye slowly dripping down the side of the sink that neither of them bother to acknowledge yet.
Gabriel’s got sisters. He’s also got big crinkly gloves on and a bottle of hair dye in one hand, staring down at Jack’s roots where a new shade of hair somewhat darker than his typical marshmallow-ass has started coming in.
For the life of him, Gabriel doesn’t know why it bothers him so much. It’s truly driving him crazy. Maybe it’s because-
“It’s been three months since we’ve met and everything I know about you is a lie.”
A chuckle rushes out of Jack like a sob. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?”
“I’m just saying,” Gabriel mumbles as he squeezes the contents of the bottle into his other hand with finality and sets it back down on the counter. “I thought you were just cursed at birth, but you actually put effort into looking like a cauliflower asshole.”
“It’s not even that light-” Jack stutters, shoulders seizing up for a moment when Gabriel slaps the handful of cold hair dye onto the top of his head. He shudders. “You’re going to change your mind when you start going gray.”
“I’m never going gray, first of all.” Gabriel works his fingers through Jack’s hair, digging into the scalp. He’s covering all the guilty roots, wondering what could have been. Jack hums appreciatively.
“Oh, right. You uh, made a Faustian pact to stay forever young and good-looking.”
“Yeah, a pact called the Soldier Enhancement Program and here I am,” Gabriel says. He pauses and catches Jack’s eye in the mirror, smirking. “You really think I’m good-looking?” He tilts his face, examining his profile while Jack groans.
“No shit,” Jack says, taking the fork he stole from the mess hall and impatiently scratching behind his ear with it. Gabriel knocks it away and drags his nails over the spot, returning to this task at hand with a little more care. “Thanks,” Jack mutters with a sigh.
“Why, anyway?” Gabriel asks after a few minutes of comforting silence. Jack’s got a regulation haircut, so he’s almost done working the dye into it. “You really like the color?”
Jack almost does this thing – where he rubs the back of his neck when he’s anxious – but stops short. His hand clamps over his left arm and squeezes at the edges of a few scars instead. “It makes me stand out more,” he says.
“And you want that?” Gabriel says, no heat in his voice. He’s gone from the roots to the edges, smoothing the off-white into the boundary of his hairline. No missed spots. Again, sisters.
“Listen,” he says. “We were picked out as the best out of, what, everyone?” He’s taking a hard look at himself in the mirror, like he’s trying to break the glass with his mind. “Now we have to be the best out of the best.”
Gabriel hums skeptically. He’s double-checking his spots, running his hand over Jack’s scalp one last time before pulling off the gloves and dropping them into the garbage. “You want first dibs on the treatments? The bruises, the morning sickness, the afternoon sickness, the two-in-the-morning sickness,” he says, ticking them off with his fingers. “You sure you don’t want to watch a few people go before you? See how bad it is?”
“You’ve never done that, you-” Jack pauses, “-you always rush in.”
“Yeah, and it gets me in a lot of trouble, Jackie.” Gabriel crosses his arms and leans against the bathroom wall. “It’s only been a few months, you know. I think you’re being preemptively anxious about your place.”
Jack’s still on this bullshit when he looks back up at Gabriel, not absorbing anything he’s saying. “It’s kind of like high school. Say- I mean you either stand out or you go completely unnoticed, that middle part is useless-” he makes a vague gesture “-you’re either gorgeous, or you’re mean, or you’re really strong or you play the drums or some-”
“Getting off track,” Gabriel interrupts.
“I want more eyes on me,” Jack says. “Like you. People notice the shit you do, Gabriel.”
Gabriel snorts. “I guess.” He looks back in the mirror, running a hand along his jaw. “So which am I? Gorgeous, mean, really strong?”
“Mean,” Jack says as he steps out of the bathroom, grinning. “And a perfect shot.”
“Not perfect,” Gabriel says. “Just better. You’re in the top five anyway, what’s wrong with that?”
Jack reappears in the doorway, eyebrow raised. “I need to be number one.” He looks Gabriel up and down. “I might even settle for number two.”
“Yeah, better get used to that idea now, Jack,” he mutters, laughing as Jack throws him a middle finger over his shoulder, disappearing back into their shared room to reclaim his spot in front of his datapad.
*
0300 Local Time
Yalova, Turkey
There’s no designation for the operation yet, no name for the gauntlet of missions he runs to eradicate the last several dozen loose threads that Overwatch left behind when the walls came down. Maybe there doesn’t need to be, maybe it’ll just be a job that he does until he runs out of targets or one of them manages to trap him in a bottle. More like a hobby, really, a task that Talon doesn’t want to admit they’re spending resources on, or taking valuable time away from one of their strongest assets. After all, how dangerous can a cat be, after you’ve pulled out all of its claws and declared it an enemy of the world?
It used to be fun. When he was mindless and following orders, every agent crumbled like a sand castle and he’d plunged his hands into the salty waters to feel how it was below the rocks and the seaweed.
An excuse to travel.
The ease of the endless torment of his weird fuckin’ body – something in other people made him whole.
Now he’s wobbling under the infuriating weight of cognizance. With every kill comes more uncertainty that what he’s doing is anywhere near the realm of Good and it bothers him to even be concerned with that. It’s like he’s trying to find himself in a room of a hundred mirrors.
With the dog tags against his chest and Talon communications blasting in his ear constantly, he’s decided to change his playbook. Going off script is what he’s known for now, and they’ve come to depend on it. Luckily, the goons they send out with him are the very model of replaceable so he can get them killed at alarming rates. He can lead them into a trap, watch them die, and as long as he eliminates the agent within the next few minutes no one even mentions it. Long term, he’s hoping to be deemed unfit for a team and eventually sent out on his own.
For now, he’s severed his connection to his subordinates, leaving them wandering the coast searching for him the old fashioned way. The wind picked up as they landed, and that coupled with the somewhat remote area they’re operating in, it threw their communications into disarray. If he goes dark for a couple of hours, maybe none of them will think too hard about it. For good measure, he plucks the comm from his mask and crushes it between his palms. If he’s going to have a conversation with one of these rogue agents, he needs it to be private.
He wanders around the marketplace, where the wind has blown over dense fog from the sea and he moves through it like a ghost. All of the little shops are barricaded with minimal reinforcement, as though protected more from the elements than from theft – a place where they still rely on the goodness of humanity and trust for each other to get by. Judging by the untouched quality of, well, everything, he guesses this seaside town has the right idea.
Nice place to settle down if – Oh, shit, don’t go there.
Every apartment in the square has a balcony, every balcony has laundry drying on the railing or leafy greens spilling between the bars. Multi-colored flags and strands of bright lights hang in the spaces between one building and the next. In the distance, the winding grassy waterfront and intricately sprawling parks hug Marmara, and the rocky hills beyond that -- vast shadows against the starlit sky.
Reaper moves on through the city silently, smoke over water, and a few lights blink out in the endless columns of apartments. The shotguns hang heavy against his thighs, unused for days.
Eventually he eases out of the dense metropolitan area, across a wide road and an immaculate green yard to the shore where the sand meets the grass and water. So late at night, there’s not a soul on the beach but him.
And one other. Somewhere further down the coastline.
It was the quiet trill of a distress beacon in his head, bouncing off the walls of the empty space left in the absence of Talon operatives clucking in his ear.
He goes incorporeal to drift down the coast swiftly, unsure if his team also hears the beacon, confident that even if they had they tend to drag ass without a leader, but not confident enough to take his time. This agent is his, alone. Kennedy, the voice in his head purrs like a low roar.
There’s a lonesome gazebo just beyond the sand of the beach. In it sits a figure, slouched with hands draped over knees, gazing out at the dark water. The shriek of the distress beacon calms to a whisper as he approaches.
“Somehow I knew it would be you, Commander.”
Reaper pauses mid-step and silently flips through his scattered memories but the voice is a mystery. There’s a gentle, submissive cadence to it that he knows he should know, feels the hum of it in his chest, but it’s another unknown. He has a familiar accent, but he can’t place it.
“I admit, at first I didn’t believe it.” The man drawls on as Reaper rounds the gazebo, coming to stand in front of him. He’s got bags under his eyes, deep and black like makeup. When he looks at Reaper there’s a glimmer of hope so genuine and obscene even he can recognize it. Reaper can only linger, phasing in and out like a ghost.
“You don’t recognize me, do you, boss?” he asks.
“No.” Reaper tries to spit it at him, but in his haste he’s revealed a scrap of sympathy.
The agent runs a hand through his mess of pale hair. In the barest light from the nearby lamp, it looks reddish. “That’s probably for the best,” he says with a heavy sigh.
It’s right at that moment when Reaper notices the scattered hype kit at the man’s side, used and discarded on the bench. He tilts his head and the man follows his gaze, heaves up with another breath. “Ah, yeah.” He gathers the pieces up and dumps it into a bag at his feet. “I kept more than just the training from the old days, you know? I don’t intend to be taken in by anyone, not now.” He looks back up and into Reaper’s mask like he’s searching for eyes. “Slow to take effect, but absolutely fatal. Had a lot of fun with this stuff back in the day, that’s for sure.”
Reaper stays silent. Tries to remember those days he keeps mentioning.
“I’m definitely going to die here, boss,” he says encouragingly, leaning in and trying to break through. “But it gives us a chance to speak.” He pats the front of his suit and fishes out a cigarette and lighter from a pocket.
“Then speak, agent Kennedy,” Reaper says. Talon knows him, while he didn’t bother to read the dossier beyond the need-to-knows. Not that it would have done him much good - there was a lot of black on that document.
The agent looks excited for just a moment, and it’s in that moment that Reaper feels the worst. “No, that’s not what you called me,” he says quietly. He shakily lights his cigarette and brings it to his lips, trapping it between his teeth.
Agent Kennedy wrings his hands together nervously, looks anywhere but Reaper’s face. He’s wearing a nice suit, like he’s going to a funeral. According to his file, he was an infiltration expert. He could change his persona in an instant and had a dozen solid covers. He was working for Talon. He was working for [redacted.] “I’ve been on the lam for eight years. Do you know what that’s like?” Kinda. “I’m goddamn overjoyed that your lot has caught up with me.”
Reaper gestures to the bag at his feet. “Could have ended it whenever you wanted.”
The agent huffs. “Yeah, right, in a shack out in the middle of the desert. Some hostel in Berlin, right? Now, those are two places I’ve already almost died, and neither of them felt worth it.” His accent grows heavier the less patient he gets. “But, this-” he gestures between them “-this is good shit. I’ve waited years for this, and you don’t even remember me.”
Now, Reaper had this grand idea. Drop on the agent, force them to spill about Overwatch, kill. Rinse, repeat, until he had some sort of breakthrough. This one is a game changer. Obviously he was in deep. Talon wants him dead because he has ties to Overwatch, though what in particular they won’t say. And because at some point, he defected and disappeared.
This one knows him. And now he’s going to lose him.
If he’s going to get what he wants out of Agent Kennedy, he has to reconcile with him, he has to get on his level, and his current level is that gossamer-thin realm between dying and dead. Reaper can sympathize with that.
All or nothing, he thinks. Reaper crouches down, waits until the agent works up the nerve to look him in the face. “You’re the first rogue agent I haven’t immediately put down,” he says. The agent keeps his mouth firmly shut, eyes watering. “I can’t remember who I am, or who I was.”
“That’s a real shame,” the agent whispers, fiercely. A shudder goes down all of his hard edges, a sharp jab of real, true empathy. The voice in his head is quiet, but present. “I waited all these years for you to pop up again, even after that business in Switzerland, I knew, I knew-” he takes a deep breath. “You’re hard to kill, boss, always were.”
“You know who I am,” Reaper says, the only thing in this conversation that makes sense. He’s taken note of every little detail to follow up on later, but the only thing he really needs is right in front of him, being dangled in his face like a taunt. He grows restless and agitated after the agent nods silently. “And you won’t tell me.”
“Oh, no,” the agent says. He slumps against the wood frame of the gazebo, becoming lax at every point in his body. When he leans his head back and gazes up, a tear rolls down his face. “I won’t kill you a second time, boss.” Kennedy shudders, takes in one long, shaking breath, and swallows it. His eyes shut as he grips his thighs against a mighty tremor. “I’ve only ever seen this from the outside, but this really, really hurts,” he says, voice cracking.
With a gasp he pulls himself forward again, reaching out to grasp at the collar of Reaper’s armor. Reaper wraps a hand around his wrist, but doesn’t move it.
“But you- you always did right by me, boss. Even when I let you down.” Something was coming, a great upheaval of truth. Reaper tries to feel excited but all that comes up is dust. Despite his best attempt at apathy, it wasn’t so much the loss of valuable information the agent embodied that he was reluctant to lose, but the agent himself. Reaper grips his shoulder with his other hand, steadying him. Suddenly, faced with this impending inevitability, the only thing he can focus on is the muted grief in tandem with the voice who shares his thoughts. It’s a pain much more intense than he thought himself capable of.
Between gasping breaths, the agent continues. “Go to Los Angeles. Don’t think too hard, just go there and follow your instincts. If you’re really still in there, then you deserve to know. If not-” he pauses to grimace and let go of Reaper’s armor. He slumps back against the wall, hands trembling in his lap. “If not, I won’t give you the satisfaction.” His gaze slides to the ground, as though embarrassed. Reaper realizes the agent is addressing two people: Reaper, and the potentiality of the man this agent knew quite well. The voice in his head rallies, a swell of anger and grief. A sudden, weak laugh escapes the agent. “I can’t believe we ever used this shit.”
“There he is!”
Reaper turns to his pack of goons, hustling their way to him, and he wonders.
“Do it,” the agent says. Reaper turns to him and sees him wipe away the tears with the back of his hand, mouth set in a firm line. The black of his veins have started to overtake his face, the last surge of the poison in him. “I mean-” he makes a gun with his fingers and shoots it at himself. “If you don’t, they might get suspicious.”
He wants to say something, but he can’t form the words. If they had fought at all, the banter would come easily. Kennedy closes his eyes and mumbles a string of words Reaper can’t make out, his hands fidgeting in his lap. He has nothing but this incriminating scene and a quickly-approaching party of witnesses. And less information than he hoped for. As he hefts the shotgun from his belt, the agent finishes his prayer and falls silent.
One shot takes his head clean off, a splatter of blood against the wall. This time, that strange mass of energy is easier to take from the body, bleeding through the chest and collecting in the palm of his hand like it was coming home. His grunts gather around him as he consumes it.
“Great work, boss,” one of them says, deadpan. Another relays a message quietly through her com. He hears the feedback from her device announcing evac soon.
He could turn around and obliterate all of them in three seconds. It would be so easy, and the chance of reprimand is still surprisingly low.
But he hesitates. All he has are the few little pieces of information he got from the agent, the unobtrusive but profound sorrow in the back of his mind, and the insistent ringing in his ears, the distress beacon that has not yet stopped screaming and will not likely be silenced for a long time.
Rather than lash out, he takes some time to treasure these. Stands apart from his subordinates, facing the vast darkness of the water, patient and still as a statue. This, he thinks as another malaise comes to rest over him, a hollowed-out sensation in his chest and a numb stillness in his head – this will last.
*
“Twenty-four, please return to your dorm.”
Gabe pretends not to hear her, which is a bold move considering the speaker is three feet away. He rolls his eyes to the side, settles his gaze on the limp hand in his grip. It’s been four hours, though it feels more like ten minutes. Jack’s face is still kind of ghost-white.
“Twenty-four.”
“I have a name,” Gabe says. He can’t stand being called by that fucking number.
The tech sighs, whole body sagging. Finally Gabe can recognize a bit of decency out of the impeachable indifference they self-project onto themselves. “Mister Reyes.” Honestly he’s surprised she was able to recall his name so quickly. “We’ve made a note of his poor reaction to the treatment, but with some monitoring it likely won’t happen again. He’s going to be fine.”
He huffs. “He wasn’t fine a few hours ago. He was real fucked up a few hours ago.”
What he didn’t exactly go into detail about was what he walked into.
More blood than he’d seen in a while, puddling at the feet of his roommate and friend. At the sound of Gabe’s entrance, Jack lifted his gaze from his hands and looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy, a faraway look from his persistently bright friend. “Jack?” He reached out carefully.
He couldn’t see a weapon or any immediate danger besides the blood dripping from the gashes along his forearm -- and he’d shredded the damn thing, like cheese -- through the sluggish efforts of the accelerated healing. He wasn’t afraid to approach the man. At this point he’d grab him armed and foaming at the mouth.
Jack stared at him through this gauzy haze before recognizing him, upset. Finally he seemed to notice his arm, too. “Gabe, I don’t know wh- I just couldn’t look at them anymore,” he said, thoughtfully.
Gabe dropped his guard and slammed a fist into the panic button near their door. “What, your fuckin’ arm?” He grabbed his bloodied hand and pulled him close. “They can just take the whole damn thing away if it bothers you so much.” He found one of his black scarves, and tightened it around his arm up near the elbow, where it might staunch the bleeding until help arrived. He pulled him over to one of their beds, where he sat and pulled Jack up, one hand in hand, the other wrapped around the injured wrist, holding it up and away from the rest of him.
Bloodied or not, Gabe held onto him like a teddy bear. Jack hardly seemed to mind, letting his head fall back onto Gabe’s shoulder as the adrenaline of self-infliction wore off.
“Fine.” Gabe was brought back to the moment as the tech spoke, eyeing him with scrutiny. “I’ll pretend I didn’t catch you in here, and you don’t give me grief the next time I have to give you an intramuscular injection.”
He gives her a lazy salute in response. Her footsteps are the barest echo of a sound down the hall before he hears Jack speak up.
“Hey.” The hand in his gives a little squeeze.
Gabe looks over and -- after dominating the flash flood of relief -- pins Jack down with an unimpressed but mild glare. Jack smiles back at him.
“You know, this is why I told you not to rush into these treatments. Let some other guy have a bad reaction, Jackie, I like you.”
Jack scoffs, shakes his head and smiles. Gabe puts his head against the back of his chair and stares at the ceiling, ignoring the tension of the heavy load of his little speech as it settles over the silence that follows. Maybe mercifully, Jack doesn’t say anything more. It should piss him off at least somewhat, but Gabe is decidedly not a Big Enough Asshole to poke at the problem. To be honest, the greatest sensation he’s feeling is relief.
When he looks back, Jack is prying off the bandages with his other hand.
“Hey,” Gabe says seriously. The hold he has on Jack’s injured hand tightens but he doesn’t quite try and stop him.
The bandages spool away little by little, and what Gabe expects is a flush of blood, but the skin underneath is smooth and completely knit together. Only a few hours later and it’s like it never happened at all.
Briefly and invasively, Gabe recalls a mosaic of scars along one of Jack’s arms. He never appeared self-conscious, never made an effort to hide them or keep his shirt on rather than suffer the occasional intrusive stare. Gabe wanted to ask so many times, but he never felt close enough, wasn’t sure with himself whether being close enough validated trying to peer into a room he was never invited into in the first place.
As for those scars, they’re mostly gone. Erased with Jack’s episode and Jack, despite his exhaustion, looks absolutely in awe of it, like the man staring into the first light bulb.
“I was right,” he whispers. Like the first time Superman realized he could deflect a bullet.
*
Gabe understands this feeling six months later, understands it like a knife through the heart. When the director of the program decides that they’ve experimented enough with the treatments and the training, wants to throw them into the fire and see if they all burn up. They’re still neck deep in the Crisis, after all.
They’re dropped into South Carolina, somewhere along the edge of the national forest. Gabe’s thrilled halfway to death, raking his eyes over the gold landscape like a lion uncaged. He wasn’t given that “travel the world” speech in his high school’s lunchroom, he just wanted a direction to fling himself in when he decided to sign up. He hasn’t seen much of the world yet but he can already tell California sits in his heart like an anchor. Carolina is strange. Low and dry, hot and intense.
Jack looks comfortable, basking in it all like a cat.
The town into which they were unceremoniously dropped has been cleared out due to the encroaching wave of omnics. They were lucky the program set base so close in nearby Missouri. Usually these rural folks suffer alone.
It doesn’t take long before the fight reaches them, and Gabe meets it like a soldier. Just a soldier. He’s fast, he’s stronger and more agile, still as tactically sharp as he was before the program. He’s a little disappointed that he can’t, fuck, fly or something. That Superman dilemma, however, comes rushing up the day they get ambushed. He didn’t know he could deflect a bullet until he tried.
That thought splits him from his rational self, like his head’s been cleaved in two between the bright and the brave parts of him, when a bastion drops from a ship and caves in the ground at its base. Jack’s crouched with some civilians -- obviously -- and turns just as it arms its gatling gun.
And Gabe throws himself between them, taking an impressive hail of bullets into the bulk of his armored chest. Jack launches a trio of helix rockets at the thing from around the shield of his friend’s body and it goes down with a sad whine as Gabe hits the ground. From its corpse a bright red light shoots into the sky and erupts like a firework. Gabe hears Jack yell something, a string of something.
Jack hauls his body away and out of sight while command chatters in his ear to sit tight -- a squad of Crusaders is en route. “I didn’t know we were gettin’ some of those,” he mumbles.
“Yeah, well this fight’s gotten a lot bigger over the past week,” Jack says as he props him up against something hard. The wind still blows against his face. He’s absolutely in shock so he enjoys that while it lasts. He also enjoys Jack’s hand gently resting on his face, pushing the flop of hair out of his eyes. “Why did you do that?”
“Wanted to see what my superpower was,” Gabe says, trying and failing to push himself away from the thing he’s leaning against but he’s so, so heavy. The pain slowly seeps in -- he feels like an oil painting. “And I saved your ass.”
Jack scoops up his hand and holds it while he guides him to a position flat against the ground. It’s getting harder to focus on anything but the parts of him that are on fire, throbbing like a dog-sized hornet that keeps stinging him. Jack cracks the outer shell of his armor and pulls it apart.
“Congratulations, you’re hard to kill.” Jack’s voice sounds farther away. His hands are wet when he pulls them back, but he looks serene. He can’t fool Gabe -- the man shares a bathroom with him -- he knows when Jack is terrified. His hands tremble until the ground under them shakes, shakes Gabe up with a hiss, the telltale clashes of armor against earth. “They’re here,” he says, eyes turned toward the uproar, a round of hearty laughter and the clamor of those huge suits pounding against the ground.
“I’ve never seen them in person before,” Gabe groans, opening his eyes just as a Crusader brushes past them. They all look like something out of one of those movies he used to watch when he was a kid, with the huge robots. There were a ton of them.
They have coverage on one side, but another Crusader puts their back to them and engages their shield to cover them from the other side. “Where did those people go?” Gabe asks, staring at the shimmering field of light and its stalwart bearer looming over the stage. “This wouldn’t have been for much if they all got blown to shit.”
“They scattered in a safe direction,” Jack replies distractedly. His hands are working where Gabe can’t see them, but he feels them putting pressure on his stomach. Jack will carefully explain to him later that he was holding some of his guts in his body until their healing took over. “Gabriel, you son of a bitch.”
Gabe smiles at him. He shudders as pain washes over him like a roll of thunder and that makes Jack press harder, throwing him a desperate look every other moment.
“I love you, but don’t ever do anything that stupid again.”
*
When Reaper steps from the plane onto the tarmac of the Talon base he’s met with eerie silence. It’s full dark outside, no stars above the hills of Vega Alta and no spotlights through the canopy of trees that shields the entrance from prying eyes. Their bases never sleep, and beyond that there always a team who escorts them back inside. There’s no one, and despite all his forced apathy, Reaper is anxious.
Every time you’ve felt suspicious, the voice in the back of his head says, you’ve had a reason for it.
He lets out a low growl, the only sound that jerks the invisible leash back from his goons. They -- the five of them -- stop and turn slowly. By now, he’s come to an educated guess that they’re from test tubes, and every single time they do anything in unison he’s less and less certain that they’re human at all.
A few of them adjust their weapons. They all stand just out of arm’s reach. That sense of anticipation, that unstoppable dread right before something bad happens. That’s when he remembers there were six of them back on the carrier.
One of them breaks position just as he hears the hum over his shoulder, a pitying tilt to his head. “Sorry, boss.”
He’s lit up like an electrical fire. The goons surround him, weapons drawn, as he’s forced to his knees from the lightning storm being threaded through his body. It’s too much to evaporate out of -- the power keeps him together like a bag over his head -- terrifyingly solid. As he lowers himself to his hands, then his chest pressing against the cold ground, he battles between his surprise that his subordinates possess enough guile to betray him and his fury at, well, everything else.
*
“Are you saying I don’t have a right to be angry?”
The clock on the wall ticks so, so loud between what he says and whatever’s going to happen next. In that space she writes something down and doesn’t look at him. Gabriel stares at her, waiting.
Her dark hair falls down below her shoulders, silver earrings visible on one side where she’s tucked those strands behind her ear. There’s a long scar splitting her lips into four distinct sections and, while it doesn’t look fresh, it looks painful. Gabriel switches tactics and sacrifices some of his grace.
“That’s a pretty nasty scar,” he says thoughtfully. “How’d it happen, if you don’t mind me asking?”
The moment her pen stops and her lips purse, he feels like a Huge Asshole. He’s hoping he hasn’t truly upset her, but he needs to poke at her a little, just enough to force her to drop that academic act and talk to him like a real person.
“Crisis,” she says. She sets the pen down and looks up at him. Crisis is a word imbued with so much history sometimes it’s all that needs to be said. She goes on, however. “Got this scar in an omnic attack that leveled my neighborhood when I was a kid. That’s all.”
Gabriel nods, tries to make his expression open but it must look imploring, because she sets her pen down with finality. “I was angry, for a long time,” she says. Her stare could light a match. “However, there is a difference between anger in the hand that holds power, and anger in the hands of the powerless, Commander Reyes.”
Damn it. She has a point and he immediately concedes to it with a bow of his head.
“I’m not trying to put you on the spot, Commander, but you’re here for misuse of authority to… varying degrees.”
God, if only she knew. When they first went through these sessions they were for maintenance. Both the stress of leadership and the harrowing experiences in war and post-war activity threatened to knock out the world’s heroes one by one. He and Jack and Ana would all exchange banter and maybe get together for quiet, personal time. He knows this time they won’t be waiting for him, he’ll face the aftermath of this on his own, in the dull silence of New Jersey in February.
“I’ve read the statements.”
Gabriel knows these last few meetings were for the express purpose of trying to wring some sympathy out of Jack and the powers that be that desperately want to out him as a rogue entity. He’s just tugging a few more inches out of the rope he’s got around his neck. It makes him so angry, having to beg and bargain for the credibility he’s already earned, that he’s been dragging behind him for two decades already.
If only they knew-
“If only any of them knew what we’re up against, what it takes to fight it.” He says it without really meaning to, the back and forth of his thoughts always leading back to a helplessness that the UN and their willful ignorance is going to destroy all that they fought to protect, unless he creates a big enough crater to grab their -- and Jack’s -- attention. It used to be so easy, at least with the latter.
She looks up, startled but hiding it well. He’s seen that look before. He briefly wonders how high her clearance is.
He curls a hand against his thigh and takes a deep breath. “They asked me to help protect the world. Some things can’t be beaten down with a strongly-worded letter.”
She squints at him now as though trying to stare at the sun. It’s as honest an expression as he’s ever seen, of someone who’s really trying to understand him. “We need to find our way back to the mission that sent you to me.” She leads him, quietly and patiently, through a river of blood.
Deep in his chest, Gabriel’s heart thunders.
*
Reaper’s been here before, under a red light, mask off and totally exposed. He’s made up of building blocks that only he can dismantle. Weirdly enough, in all the time he’s been with Talon, even with all the early experiments, there’s only one other person who’s seen him without his mask on.
She stands before him now, red and venomous like a copperhead. Still, she talks to him like a person, not like a child reaching their hand towards a hot stove, scared but curious.
“They were concerned with your performance,” she says without a hint of judgment, looking over his bare hands as liquid slowly drips into the IV tube attached to the base of his neck. “More precisely, with your hesitation in eliminating the target. They suggested reprogramming, obviously.”
It’s kind of fucked up to admit it, but he finds these sessions almost calming. Whatever she does, it smooths the bleeding edges of his ghastly body, makes it easier to control and tolerate. Even the steady beep of the distress beacon becomes quieter background noise.
He’s lulled into docility and it’s only just briefly that he realizes Doctor O'Deorain and that agent Kennedy have the same accent. “I don’t think that’s necessary. You’re capable of functioning as a free agent, just as you have for the last couple of decades,” she huffs a bitter laugh.
“They are afraid of me,” Reaper says.
She hums an affirmative. With her examination done, she gets up, collects a few things, and walks to the door. One long nail taps the door frame and she looks at him over her shoulder. “They will fear you more so, when you are completely back to yourself, Commander. I look forward to it.” She leaves.
That’s the second time he’s been taunted with his years-long fugue state in one day, but it rolls over him like a cold breeze. In his personal quarters, far and away from the rest of the base, he feels confident enough to push that anxiety to the back of his mind.
The red lights strobe above his head like a heartbeat. The ringing in his ears comes back and climbs to a crescendo but the voice in his head talks him through it.
Los Angeles, it whispers like a mantra, longing scoring trenches into his chest.
Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles.