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Strike Commander Morrison looked up from his tablet. The standard Athena terminal on the ceiling was softly pulsing blue. A soothing, synthetic voice of a woman announced, "Good morning, Commander, Dr. Ziegler would like to speak to you."
"Patch her through," Morrison said, quickly glancing over the last lines of the report he had been reading. The hemispheric terminal went dim, then illuminated his red-carpet floor with a lifelike hologram of a blonde woman sitting on a stool, reading from a tablet of her own. "Morning, doc. How can I help you?" He asked through a sip from his mug.
The woman in the lab coat looked up and rose to her feet, "I have discovered a complication involving Lieutenant Wilhelm's condition."
The Strike Commander's blue eyes flicked up. He set his mug down hard enough to spill droplets of tea onto the rich mahogany desk. "Reinhardt? Is he okay?" He asked, sitting up straight. The Doctor had his attention.
Dr. Ziegler nodded, "Yes, the Lieutenant is stable for now, but there is something you'll want to take a look at." The Doctor reached for something off-camera, her arms abruptly cropping into thin air.
"I'll be right down. Where are you?" Morrison asked, already halfway to the door.
"You'll find us on level B-4. Advanced Diagnostics and Imaging. Room 2." The woman barely finished before Morrison slammed his door shut behind him.
"What is it?" Morrison asked as the glass door hissed open. He stepped into the glass-walled, sterile cubicle. Inside the observation area, Reinhardt's hulking form slumped on a white leather-padded bed. The bed levitated at waist-level, outlined in thin strips of light. A ring of unfamiliar equipment hovered around it. Like the bed, the floating ring was seamless, its inner surface glowing the pale blue of their base AI, Athena.
"We found another one." Angela waved at an empty wall. Holoscreens displaying various graphs and measurements appeared as floating slices of glass.
The Commander gave them a cursory glance, "Another one of those things?" He frowned, recalling the shriveled segments of the spider-like creature the Doctor had cut off from Reinhardt's body.
"Another parasitic organism, yes." Dr. Ziegler waved away the overlapping panes of numbers and graphs and enlarged a cross-sectional model of the silver giant on the floating bed. Inside the black outline, blood vessels and other soft tissues were highlighted in shades of blue, and the bones in green. In his midsection, an ominous red blob floated inside a puddle of blue soft tissue.
"How the fuck did we miss this?"
"The new specimen has homogenized with its host remarkably well. The initial scans registered it to be a part of the Lieutenant's body. I only found it this morning after running a quantic scan when Athena alerted me of anomalous patterns in his brain activity," the Doctor explained.
"Why didn't you run the damn scan before?" Morrison demanded.
The Doctor shook her head with thinning patience, "Quantic scans are experimental technology, very radioactive and taxing for the patient, especially given the Lieutenant's physical state when he was recovered. I don't usually run them on anyone unless I have good reason to, which did not present itself until this morning."
"Couldn't you've just done a colonoscopy?" Morrison grumbled half-heartedly.
Ziegler shot the Commander with a look of disgust as if she was watching him eat off the floor but didn't otherwise comment on being told how to do her job. "We stopped performing colonoscopies half a century ago, Jack. I can assure you we are using every technology at our disposal to provide the best care possible for the Lieutenant."
The Commander shook his head and sighed. "Okay, so when is the surgery scheduled to get this thing out?"
The Doctor had clearly anticipated the question, quickly zooming the scan in on Reinhardt’s pelvis. Various shades of blue representing soft tissue refined until individual muscles could be discerned. She pointed at the red blob in the center of the screen. The anomaly appeared similar to a horizontal leaf with spiny, triple-jointed legs sprouting all along its perimeter. They stabbed into the shades of blue surrounding it, becoming a dark shade of violet. Morrison winced. Reinhardt was literally being punctured from the inside.
"That– is the organism. Does it look familiar to you?" Ziegler pointedly ignored Morrison's discomfort.
"It's just like the one we pried off him before, except smaller, and no tail." Morrison recalled finding Reinhardt slumped in the corner of the humid interrogation chamber, with a colossal spider-like thing clinging to Reinhardt's back. Various appendages snaked under his arms to reach his chest and belly. Between his legs a flat tentacle reached up from his taint to adhere itself to the underside of Reinhardt's ruddy cock and to envelop his glans with a translucent, membranous sheath, while two more tentacles wrapped around his pelvis and latched on to his heavy ripe balls, licking and stimulating him with maws full of wet cilia.
"And completely composed of soft tissue," Ziegler's voice penetrated his daze, drawing him back to the present, "whereas the much larger specimen we removed from the Lieutenant possessed comprehensive bone structures and was attached to the Lieutenant's lower back. From the outside.”
"Meaning?" Morrison asked, his eyes fixed on red appendages buried in soft blue.
"Meaning the new specimen is specifically adapted to attach to its host internally. Such a huge departure in the organism's manner of parasitism— the literal mechanisms a living creature relies on to survive— within two generations is unprecedented." An aberrant trepidation in Ziegler's voice made the Commander's stomach drop. The Doctor had always remained empathetically centered throughout two decades of treating injuries from weapons designed to cause the maximum amount of pain and disfigurement. It was the first time Morrison had seen his longtime friend so unsettled. "In nature, for something to evolve from being large enough to cover Lieutenant Wilhelm's entire back and having an endoskeleton, to becoming an entirely gelatinous blob the size of a walnut would take hundreds, if not thousands of generations of trial and error."
Morrison swallowed, his forehead burning with anxiety simply because Ziegler's was too. "You mentioned 'generations', are you saying that this thing impregnated Reinhardt before we removed it?"
"That's the working theory. Gene-sequencing results support that the two specimens are closely related. While that does not eliminate the possibility that they were created separate from each other, it's much more likely that the specimen we are looking at right now is the offspring of the one we removed."
"What's it doing?" Morrison looked toward the silver giant lying motionless on the floating bed, his massive arms neatly by his side. To see the lighthearted grin absent from Reinhardt's face conjured unwelcome images of him in a casket. Another friend he'd have to bury.
Ziegler cleared her throat, "As far as we can tell, the organism is still... 'interrogating' the Lieutenant with the same precepts as its parent."
Morrison's eyes widened, "What? Are you saying he's still constantly…cumming? This whole time?"
"Well, not exactly." Ziegler winced at the term.
"The hell does that mean?" Morrison raked his fingers through his grey hair.
Ziegler directed their attention to a line graph on the wall; she traced her pen along a section of sharp but steadily rising waves, "You see, this is a graph for how much brain activity we are seeing in the Lieutenant, and right now these sharp intervals mean his brain is indeed responding to intense stimuli." The Doctor continued to trace the waves for a few moments before the line started to shakily rise at a sharp incline before abruptly falling flat and gradually tapering down again.
"And this sharp incline here represents the preceding stages of an orgasm, triggered when the stimulation the specimen is applying crosses a certain threshold. After this threshold is reached, the brain almost instantly becomes much more susceptible to additional stimuli in preparation of the event itself." Angela pointed her pen at the sharp incline. "Hence, the sudden spike in brain activity."
"The what?"
"He is about to orgasm," Ziegler drew a breath, deeply uncomfortable..
"What are those, then?" Morrison pointed at a few noticeable, but relatively regular dips in the graph as the line continued to climb. He didn't really want to know, but desperately needed something to keep him from thinking about what Rein had been through, what he was still going through.
It took Ziegler a moment to see what Morrison was gesturing at, "Ah, those are pre-orgasmic contractions." She answered. "Look, he's experiencing them right now." The Doctor gestured at the white-haired giant of a man shifting restlessly on the bed.
"Oh," Jack whispered as he looked over and saw Rein's hip twitching in broken thrusts. The Commander cleared his throat awkwardly before pointing at the sudden plateau immediately following the incline. "What about that?"
Dr. Ziegler tapped the screen a few times, and the picture zoomed in on the end of the sharp incline, right before the graph line plateaued. "The specimen continues to stimulate the Lieutenant's prostate gland, bringing him to an orgasm." She tapped a horizontal rule that highlighted the abrupt shift in red., "Then, it would abruptly cease its movements."
"So, it's taking a fucking breather," Morrison deduced, hoping the importance of the matter would present itself soon.
"In a sense, but it's more complicated than that." Ziegler gestured at the highlighted line. "The threshold of stimuli needed for a person to achieve orgasm varies wildly. Given our paramilitary nature, we have precise measurements of everyone in our organization. The red line's value is the precisely calculated threshold for Lieutenant Wilhelm to achieve an orgasm that Athena extrapolated using his neurological records."
"Okay, and?" The Commander cupped his mouth as he crunched through all the information. Ziegler tended toward the dramatic, but she was the best at what she did..
The Doctor continued, "And as you can see here, our guest's work is impossibly precise. In every instance, the specimen seizes up right before the amount of stimulation it's providing its host exceeded his threshold." Angela explained, her neutral expression finally letting slip a glance of pity. "We've measured his brainwaves multiple times while the parasite stimulated him, and the results were consistent– the specimen would freeze up fractions of a millisecond before orgasm every single time.”
Morrison's white brows rose as he put together what the Doctor was getting at. He stepped closer to the graph and zoomed in until the plateaued line was as thick as his arm, while the highlighted threshold tailored for Reinhardt remained sharp.
The two lines never crossed, missed by mere hundredths of a hair's width.
"You're shitting me," Morrison said in a hushed voice.
"I'm a doctor, Commander. I don't do that." Ziegler's expression was stormy and afflicted.
"Wait, let me get this straight," Morrison said as he started to pace, his mouth dry from sheer disbelief. "So, what you're trying to tell me is that– this thing has been inside him for weeks since we brought him back, completely undetected, just in there edging him?"
Dr. Ziegler stuck up her nose at the term but nodded. "In essence, yes. Albeit with more skill and precision than humans could ever hope to achieve. That's thanks to how deeply the parasite has integrated itself with the Lieutenant's nervous and limbic systems,"
"Meaning?" Morrison exhaled deeply as he braced for more.
Dr. Ziegler gestured toward a holoscreen featuring the rotating cross-section of Reinhardt's standing form, his spine and brain highlighted. The prominent blob of red sat just behind the model's pubic bone. Countless tapered tendrils originating from the parasite spiraled upward along Reinhardt's spine, threading between the vertebrates like beanstalks climbing a stick. The longest ones reached all the way to the lower parts of the brain itself. "It means the organism can feel exactly what the Lieutenant is feeling. And I suspect it is capable of doing so with far more acuity than even the host himself."
The Commander swallowed nervously. It had been a long time since the seasoned veteran felt genuinely shocked. Still, the insidiousness behind meticulously creating living monstrosities with the express purpose of torture sent violent shivers down his spine.
"You mean that's how it knows when to stop," Morrison said quietly.
"Correct, and that's not the only effect of their neurologic connection. The organism also has access to the host's thalamus, which is primarily responsible for relaying sensory information. I've theorized that this connection could be utilized to induce vivid hallucinations in the host, perhaps even produce physically impossible sensations, anywhere it pleases on the Lieutenant's body." The Doctor paused as she pushed her glasses up.
"Fuck me," Morrison grumbled, turning his back to the holoscreens.
Ziegler cleared her throat sharply, displeased by Morrison's unfortunate turn of phrase. The snowy-haired man pointedly ignored her hypersensitivity.
"Are you going to get to why we can't just rip it out?"
"Oh, why didn't I think of that?" Ziegler rolled her eyes. "Of course, I would have done so already, if it were possible. That is the reason why I called you here."
Morrison grunted affirmatively. Touché.
"The first specimen was able to infiltrate his nervous system to a certain degree, and while the interfacing was astonishingly sophisticated, we were eventually able to sever the connection and safely remove it, partially thanks to it being on the outside of the Lieutenant. The new specimen here is… much more advanced." Ziegler seemed unsure how to vocalize her thoughts, "Scans show that its level of integration with the Lieutenant's nervous and limbic systems are nothing short of astonishing. Light years beyond what even the most advanced neuro-interfaces developed by Vishkar can ever hope to achieve. The connections are so entwined, the specimen might as well be a part of the host's brain itself. I can confidently say that this organism can easily stop the Lieutenant's heart at will, should it feel threatened enough, by say, an attempt to 'rip it out.'"
Morrison closed his eyes; the glass cubicle seemed to close in around him. He paced to the other side of the room to look out at the atrium, trying to calm his thoughts with the luscious greenery circling the outcrops of each floor. A fucking bug is holding my friend hostage, and there’s nothing I can do about it! We can’t rescue him! Even the most skilled healer on the planet could do nothing to ease his suffering.
The most insidious enemies were the ones he couldn't shoot.
"So what, you're just going to leave that thing inside him?! Let it do whatever it wants?!" The Commander regretted his words as soon as he spoke them. Ziegler had been nothing but devoted to caring for their mutual friend.
Oddly, the thinning patience in the Doctor's voice vanished as she spoke, "Of course not, Jack. I promise we'll do everything we possibly can to care for Reinhardt. But until we find a way to remove the organism safely, we will have to wake him up."
Morrison frowned at that. "Why?"
"We have no choice. We don't know how the organism's neurochemical secretions will interact with the strong sedatives we've been using to keep the Lieutenant unconscious."
"Jesus, that could drive him insane, living with that thing inside him like that," Morrison exclaimed tiredly.
"It will undoubtedly be stressful for the Lieutenant, but Reinhardt has always been one of the strongest people I know. Just like you, Jack. For now, sustained sedation poses a much bigger threat to Reinhardt's life than the parasite itself. After all, its own survival depends on having a healthy, viable host."
The clinicality of Ziegler's words did little to soothe Morrison, but the Commander knew better than most that life conformed to no one's comfort. He nodded reluctantly. On the floating bed, Reinhardt groaned and shifted, drawing their attention.
Dr. Ziegler checked her wristwatch, "The Lieutenant is waking from his induced coma, Commander. Would you like to be the one to inform him of his condition, given your closeness?"
Morrison looked down at the stirring giant with grueling concern. "What? Oh. Yeah, I'll do it."
"Very well, I'll give you a few minutes of privacy before returning to check on him." She said.
Morrison watched the door hiss shut behind the Doctor. Athena's terminal chimed once, and the glass walls fogged up with an electric whir, shielding the room's contents from plain sight. He turned back to Reinhardt, who just opened a bleary eye.
"Jack?" Reinhardt asked in a raw voice as he tried to blink his vision into focus. "How–"
"Yeah, it's me. You're safe now." Jack answered as he grabbed a nearby stool and sat down beside his friend. "It took us a while to track you down and bring you home."
"Thank you, my friend," Reinhardt answered hoarsely, his neglected voice box warming with practice. "I never doubted for a moment that you'd come for me."
Morrison scoffed, but his scarred face was etched with worry, "How are you feeling, soldier?"
"Stronger than ever!" Reinhardt chuckled weakly, trying to sound like his usual self. Morrison smiled faintly in response, monitoring Reinhardt's movements carefully, ready to catch him should he fall. The silver giant sat up sluggishly without help; his paper gown crunched and wrinkled. He patted his body down tentatively, "Ah, I see the good Doctor has already taken the liberty to rid me of the despicable vermin that Talon tried to intimidate me with. Those cowards, where is their honor?" He shook his head dramatically as his tone tapered down. Morrison rolled his eyes as he waited for the buildup.
"I am Reinhardt!" The Crusader boomed in his usual volume as he puffed out his chest, "And to think these cowards could defeat the Lion of Eichenwalde with some measly pest? Impossible!" He chuckled.
Morrison smiled more genuinely, put at ease by the Crusader's typical boasting. "How are your wounds feeling? You had some pretty nasty cuts when we found you." Jack pushed his stool closer as he continued to keep an eye on his old friend.
Reinhardt flexed his bandaged arms. "Ah, just some bumps and bruises, nothing to worry yourself about." The Crusader waved his hand dismissively as he swung his legs over the bed's edge.
Even though Jack's stool was raised higher than the floating bed, Reinhardt dwarfed the Strike Commander, a solid wall of fur, muscles, and scars. Jack cleared his throat twice to delay having to break the news. When he was finally ready, he looked up and was met by the Crusader's signature grin. It made him feel helpless.
"Yes, Commander?" Rein's smile faded as Jack's silence dragged on. Oblivious as he could sometimes be, they had fought side by side for the better part of a century. He knew his old friend's every tell. "What troubles you, my friend?" He clamped a big paw around Morrison's shoulder with an assuring pressure.
"I'm not sure how to say it." Morrison shook his head, "It's not good."
Reinhardt fell quiet for a long moment as he reflected. "Am I dying from cancer?" He asked solemnly.
The Strike Commander blinked, "What? No–" He answered incredulously. "Cancer we can fix, but this–" Morrison cut off once more as he rephrased his thoughts yet again.
"Look, when we found you, there was this thing on your back, running along your spine. It looked like some sort of spider with a long tail." Morrison waved his hand as if it would make the 'thing' in question sound more fictional. "It was a bug engineered for interrogating prisoners. And, uh, the doctors think that they did so by, um, inducing strong stimulation to the host's...." Morrison wracked his brain as he tried to recite the sterile description the doctors had cooked up.
Fuck it.
"Basically, it makes people come over and over until they either talked or went insane. It might've gotten its hosts hooked on its secretions and whatnot, and the doctors think it rewires their reward centers– the point is, we don't really know much about what it does and how it does it."
Reinhardt's eyes darted toward the floor at the mention of the parasite, replying quietly, "Yes, my friend, I remember. The fiend was indeed... very persuasive."
Jack nodded as he eyed the silver giant, determining whether he should continue, then said slowly, "You don't have to tell anyone anything you don't want to. But the docs want to know if you remember anything about what it did to you."
The Crusader bristled with humiliation as his brain supplied him with unwelcome flashes of his grueling captivity. "It did many things to me... I cannot remember them all." Reinhardt said slowly as he tried to recall. Beneath his paper gown, unbeknownst to him, his thick, flaccid member jumped reflexively.
Jack was quick to dismiss the subject, "I see. Well if you remember something, and you want someone to talk–"
"It was relentless, cunning, and cruel. It pushed me to my limits. I fought it as much as I could," Reinhardt swallowed, his anguished gaze begging to be believed, "but day after day the fiend chipped at me, and I... I became afraid," The sad heap of a man before Morrison suddenly bore little resemblance to the rambunctious protector he remembered.
"Hey, it's okay, Rein," Morrison placed his hand on Reinhardt's wrist. His chest tightened to see such melancholy from the Crusader, always the very embodiment of fearlessness. "What you had to go through was fucked up. You lived to tell the tale after being tortured by Talon for weeks."
Rein swallowed again, "I was afraid it would force me to turn on you. On Overwatch. I was afraid because I knew eventually, it would succeed."
"What did Talon want?" Morrison asked carefully.
"They wished to learn of our position and defenses."
"They? You mean Reyes?" Jack spat out the name with venom.
Reinhardt nodded, refusing to meet Jack's eyes.
"Did you... did you give it to him?"
"No!" Reinhardt blurted instinctively before catching himself. The Crusader's cheeks burned with shame. "I don't know... I can't remember." The sullen man’s admission was barely a whisper.
Jack considered the implication of a potential leak; his eyebrows scrunching up the way they did when he thought hard.
"I have failed you, my friend," Reinhardt said.
"That's...not important right now. All that matters is that you'll live to fight another day." Jack said with a pained expression. "But there's something you should know. When we removed the parasite from you, a part of it separated and latched on inside you. We're still trying to figure out how to get it out of you safely."
Reinhardt gaped, fear momentarily darkening his eyes before he could mask it. "I see," he said as he felt an unwelcome thrill travel up and down his spine. His cock rose to half-hardness from learning that the parasite was still inside him.
"We don't know what it wants yet, but the docs say it won't hurt you, and it's too dangerous to keep you under while this thing's inside you. So, for now, I'll need you to hold on for just a little longer. Can you do that for me, soldier?" Jack felt like utter scum for invoking Reinhardt's sense of duty and honor. Yet he knew it was the only way to keep the man from crumbling.
Reinhardt nodded, "Of course." He answered quietly.
Both men straightened up when the glass door hissed again, a whoosh of air accompanied Ziegler as she walked in with a tray of instruments. "I'm glad to see you awake, Reinhardt. How are you feeling?" She gestured over a floating bench and set her tray upon it.
"Wonderful!" Reinhardt said in his usual throaty boom, already slipping his mask back on.
If Ziegler saw through the Crusader's facáde, she gave no indication of it. "That's good to hear!" She replied with a warm smile. "I trust the Commander has informed you about your condition?"
Reinhardt stiffened, but quickly recovered. "Yes. Jack has told me what I need to know, and what needs to be done."
"Good," Ziegler said as she put on her stethoscope, pointedly not dwelling on the subject. "I'll be doing a quick check-up and give you a few shots to ease you off the sedatives. Then you'll be good to go. Now inhale for me, please," she instructed as she pressed the cold diaphragm against Reinhardt's bare chest.