moonshadows | STTA 3: Possible threat, potential ally

The noise Reaper made was a deep, tearing sound of disgust.

Jesse looked up from spreading jam on his buttered toast. “What’s wrong, Dad?”

It was a sign of how deeply aggravated Reaper was that he didn’t protest the use of the word. “Talon brass is sending us a new recruit. Not the facility,” he clarified as the cowboy opened his mouth to protest. “Us, specifically. You and me. To live in our suite and, quote, assist me.”

Irritated wisps drifted away from Reaper’s shoulders and back, and Jesse chewed his toast thoughtfully for a minute.

“So…they give you any more information on the recruit?”

The wisps intensified. “No. Just that Auborn will be arriving within the next two hours to make the introductions.”

Jesse frowned. “Auborn?”

“The one that looks like a young General Tarkin.”

“Right, right.” He took another bite of toast. “Guess I should freshen up before they arrive.”

Reaper made a small, amused sound. “Might be an idea.”

Two hours later, McCree was clean and dressed and sitting in an easy chair with his pad. Reaper was at his desk, sifting through intelligence reports – or at least, pretending that’s what he was doing – when the door to their four-person suite slid open without so much as a courtesy knock. The thin, disapproving face of Tarkin-Auborn regarded them with barely-concealed disdain, hands clasped behind his back.

“This is Sombra,” he announced as a female shape peered out from behind him. “She now answers to you, Reaper. Use her well.”

A sudden shove to the small of the back propelled her into the room with a startled yelp, and the door slid shut. Sombra immediately whirled to shake her fist at it, calling Auborn an impressive number of vile things in Spanish. After one final annoyed huff, she turned back around to smile with forced cheer at McCree.

“Well, howdy there, lil’ lady,” he said, sitting up straight. “What heaven did you fall from?”

The smile transformed into a scowl. “Reaper?”

“No,” Reaper growled dryly. “That’s Agent McCree. I’m Reaper. Smack him if he misbehaves.”

“Hey!”

“That was one of the oldest pick-up lines in the book, and you fucked it up.” Reaper stood, arms crossed. “It goes, did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”

Sombra giggled.

“Now. Tell me about yourself,” Reaper demanded.

“Talon caught me hacking them,” Sombra answered promptly. “Said it was work for them or die, and I got things to do, so…”

“A hacker.” Someone who could potentially sabotage the swarm keeping him alive. Despite the alarmed wisps boiling off of him, Reaper’s voice was calm. “Fine. You can choose one of those two rooms-” one taloned gauntlet pointed at the two doors on the side of the suite opposite the two he and McCree were using “-and unless I have a mission for you, I expect you to occupy yourself quietly. If you have questions, ask McCree. And kick him if he starts humping your leg.”

“I got more dignity than that,” Jesse protested, standing up to bow to the newcomer. “It ain’t my fault you’re the kinda woman that makes men like me sit up and beg.”

Sombra reached out and flicked his ear, making him yelp. “Sit. Stay. Play dead.”

Reaper chuckled.

“Is this a Hispanic thing?” Jesse asked him sourly. “If I’m gonna get it from both sides, I’d like to at least be prepared.”

“Both sides?” Sombra peered intently at the wisping figure.

Reaper crossed his arms again in a gesture McCree recognized as trying to hide how pleased he was. “Si. Now, enough small talk. I have work to do.”

He sat and pretended to work again while listening to see what the other two would do, but Sombra excused herself to pick a room and Jesse went back to reading.

The rest of the day passed quietly; no new missions meant McCree went down to the practice range and then the gym while Sombra emerged from her room and, apparently, alternated between poking at a spare pad she’d found somewhere and just staring at Reaper.

He pretended to not notice.

McCree came back eventually with a bag of tacos and a take-out cup of soda. He left five tacos on a corner of Reaper’s desk and sat at the table in the kitchen area with the rest.

“Brought you some,” he called to Sombra.

“Not hungry,” she called back.

“That’s fine. Leaving ‘em on the counter for you.”

For several minutes, the only sounds were the crunch and rustle of McCree eating dinner. Reaper extended one hand and let it turn to smoke over his tacos, the swarm devouring them paper and all. Sombra seemed particularly intent when he did that, but she said nothing and went back to whatever she was doing on her pad.

When Jesse announced he was going to bed, he left off the ritual Dad. That bothered Reaper more than he’d thought it would. Sombra stayed up for another hour or so before announcing that she was going to bed as well. It was two hours later before Reaper realized she’d never eaten her tacos; they were still sitting on the counter.

In a fit of jealousy that she’d let them go to waste, he let one hand go to smoke and devoured them all.

Sombra was the last one out of her room the next morning, and Reaper waited for her to accuse McCree of eating her tacos, but she didn’t mention them. The cowboy was making pancakes and bacon that Reaper wished he could at least smell, even if he couldn’t taste anything, but she ignored the scents and declined the cowboy’s offer to make her some. She did help herself to a mug of hot coffee before going back to her ‘poke the pad and stare’ routine, and Reaper dismissed her.

He and Jesse sat at the table, going over intelligence reports and strategy while the cowboy ate. It was a routine stretching back to Jesse’s first days at Blackwatch, a period of quiet and bonding, and something he sorely missed whenever he or his cowboy were off on a mission. Reaper had a stack of pancakes and bacon of his own, because he did need to regularly assimilate material so his swarm could maintain his body, but he ignored it until Jesse was done eating and then absorbed it through one smoky hand. He couldn’t taste it, and he didn’t need to eat actual food, but this was a battle he’d lost to McCree years ago. He finalized plans while Jesse did the dishes, going back to his desk to write his reports for the higher-ups when the cowboy excused himself to shower and dress.

Sombra was still watching him.

She got up once McCree came back out retreating into her room to shower and possibly realizing from the cowboy’s scowl that she was sitting in his favorite seat. He didn’t say anything as he reclaimed it, but after a few minutes of reading on his pad, he absently lifted her coffee mug to his lips and almost immediately spat the liquid back out.

“Cold,” he complained. Then he froze. Giving the mug a confused look, he set it on the coffee table and went back to his pad. Although he didn’t make the comment out loud, it hung unsaid in the air between them.

She hadn’t drunk the coffee.

McCree was familiar enough with the way Reaper thought that sometimes, they didn’t need to discuss a subject to be on the same page. A simple ‘hold the fort’ as Reaper headed out to his weekly meeting was enough to convey that he didn’t trust the hacker to be unsupervised yet; Jesse’s drawled ‘yessir’ was his agreement and a promise that he wouldn’t leave until his boss came back.

The meeting was every bit as boring as it usually was. Every week, Reaper explained his analysis of various situations and suggested courses of action to one or two figures present only through viewscreens, ensconced in tall-backed chairs and shrouded in shadows. They rarely spoke, asking a question here or there but otherwise letting him talk. A waste of time, he thought, but proof that they valued his input because these were the heads of Talon. One of them – Vialli – was always present. The other, if there was a second, changed week by week. No doubt they thought they were keeping him in the dark (so to speak) with their little charade, but he’d pieced together more about their identities and the workings of Talon than they likely suspected.

That there were different factions within the organization was a given. That he (and by extension, McCree) ‘belonged’ to Vialli was equally obvious. But who the other players were, their goals and ambitions – figuring that out from scraps and side comments was the only aspect of these meetings that made them worth his while.

There were questions about Soldier 76, of course. How he’d escaped, why Reaper hadn’t killed him, and what he was going to do about the vigilante in the future.

“He’s mine,” Reaper growled emphatically. “I want him incapacitated and brought in, but not harmed and absolutely not killed. I want to break him. I’m going to make him regret every decision he’s ever made before I’m through with him.”

Surprisingly, this went over well. It made him wonder what sort of terms the previous Reaper had negotiated with Talon in the past.

He mentioned Sombra, towards the end. That he had yet to test her abilities but would do so immediately after the meeting; speculation on how she could be put to good use depending on his assessment of her skill. Maximilien was the second bigwig present, the occasional misplaced gleam marking him as an omnic, and he seemed too…uninterested…in Sombra. Something to examine more closely, Reaper thought as the meeting concluded. Maximilien’s screen winked out, Vialli thanked Reaper, and then his screen went dark as well.

Sombra was, to all appearances, engrossed in her pad when Reaper returned to the suite. McCree drawled out ‘all clear, Boss’ but did not look up from his own pad, even when Reaper came to a stop before Sombra’s chair and waited, looming, for her to look up.

“Investigate Volskaya,” he growled. “Not the company. The woman. Finances. Allies. Weak points. Anything we can leverage. I want it by tomorrow.”

It was a test, of course. They’d already investigated Katya Volskaya and had what he thought was a pretty thorough dossier. It would be interesting to see what Sombra’s report contained.

The hacker sat up straight, purple eyes alight with anticipation and possibly a hint of admiration. “You got it,” she promised.

As he returned to his desk, Sombra manifested a handful of hard-light screens and seemed to be hard at work on all of them, judging from the information that flashed by. But she’d manifested them with nothing but her own hands.

Suddenly, Maximilien’s disinterest looked a lot more interesting.

Sombra worked through lunch, worked through McCree leaving and coming back with subs and chips and soda for dinner. As Reaper assimilated his meatball sub, she closed her screens and sat up with the air of a teacher’s pet about to give a book report.

“I have completed my investigation,” she announced in a tone just shy of bragging.

Reaper leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Good. Let’s hear it.”

Her presentation was just as thorough as the existing file on Volskaya, but the way she presented the information suggested strongly that she had experience with blackmail. Vialli’s focus had been on political and financial leverage, but Sombra zeroed in on Volskaya’s young daughter and their warm relationship. A mother who loved her child, Sombra insisted, would do anything to protect that child. Especially if the mother was a strong public figure. Katya was under universal pressure to do more than just keep producing the same mechs; she had to innovate, to find a way to improve perfection. Not just for the future of Russia, but to keep her position of power and make it unassailable. To convince any enemies that attempting to get to her through her daughter was futile.

“You’re suggesting coercion rather than usurpation,” Reaper said when she finished, the first words he’d spoken during the entire presentation.

Sombra spread her hands and grinned. “Why kill the goose with the golden eggs? No need to spend all that time and effort to get your own person into her position if you can just…control the woman already in her position, right?”

“By threatenin’ her kid?” McCree asked sharply. “That’s cold.”

Sombra rounded on him. “And what do you think would happen to the child if a sniper took out her mom, hmm? I’m not suggesting we actually hurt the girl! Sheesh, you never blackmailed someone before? The point is to make your target think about what you could do – if you were unhappy enough with them. If you find the right weak spot and you’ve got a credible threat, your target will bend over backwards for you without you having to actually do anything.”

“Sombra has a point,” Reaper growled, making McCree subside without voicing his rebuttal. “If it ever becomes necessary to move against Katya Volskaya, I’ll keep that suggestion in mind.”

McCree nodded, clearly unhappy, and excused himself to the practice range. Reaper turned his attention back to the hacker.

“In the meantime…until Talon has a mission for you, I want you to track the movements of Soldier Seventy-Six to the best of your knowledge and have his current known or suspected whereabouts for me whenever I ask for them.”

“That’s it?” Sombra asked, eyebrows arching. “Just watch him?”

Reaper’s voice was low and menacing. “Is that a problem?”

The moment stretched, and then Sombra lowered her eyes. “No.”

“Good.”

He looked down and pretended to become engrossed in his work, and Sombra…went back to doing the staring thing.

If he’d still had skin, that would have made it crawl.