moonshadows

The next few days followed the same pattern, with Sombra staring at him when she had nothing else to do – and accomplishing the busywork he set her with alarming swiftness. She never ate the food Jesse left her, never drank the coffee she poured herself. Reaper assimilated the food after she’d gone to bed to keep the cowboy from getting more suspicious, and McCree confirmed that she hadn’t left the suite since her arrival. Between her apparent starvation diet and the way she interacted with those screens she projected, Reaper was coming to an uncomfortably inescapable conclusion that raised more questions than it answered.

After McCree had gone to bed – with the usual ‘good night, Dad’ for a welcome change, something that had Sombra looking up in surprise – Reaper decided it was time he and the hacker had a little chat.

“Aren’t you going to eat your burrito?” he asked casually, the first words of small talk he’d uttered towards her since her arrival.

She looked up at him, startled, and licked her lips. “I’m not hungry.”

It was the same excuse she used every time Jesse offered her food, but this time, there was a note of fear under her tone of brassy defiance. Reaper abused the quantum entanglement of his swarm to translocate across the room and manifest in front of her, arms crossed.

“I’m sure,” he growled. “The question is…why aren’t you hungry?”

Purple eyes widened slightly in alarm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lie. She was lying to him, something that made his temper flare. “Don’t give me that. You don’t eat. Do you think I haven’t noticed?”

“No, I-” Her protest cut off as one clawed gauntlet closed around her throat.

“Who sent you?” he demanded in a low snarl, lifting her half out of her chair. “Who made you?”

“No one sent me! Tehuacán made my body, but-”

“So Tehuacán sent you?”

Both of her hands clung to his wrist as she dangled in his grip. “No! No one sent me!”

“Then why are you here?”

Reaper had just registered Jesse’s door opening when his entire body suddenly trembled, like when he’d pushed his muscles too hard back when he still had them, only in every inch of his form. Sombra dropped from his unresponsive hand and he stumbled back two steps before the backs of his legs hit the coffee table. A pair of strong arms caught him as he toppled over.

“What did you do to my dad?” McCree demanded, furious and remarkably intimidating for a man wearing a pair of cactus-print boxers and nothing else.

“It’s not gonna hurt him-”

“That’s not what I asked!” he roared. “What the fuck did you do to my dad?”

His ash-and-nanite body was…buzzing. It felt less like there were ants crawling all over him and more like his body was made of ants. Weakly, he fought free of McCree’s arms to curl into a ball on the coffee table as if he could hold himself together that way. His sight deteriorated into the spatial awareness of the swarm, and even that went patchy as his hearing drifted in and out of static.

“…won’t hurt him…upgrade…swarm…”

Sombra sounded like she was trying to talk her way out of McCree’s metal fist, Reaper thought in distant satisfaction.

“…let some snotty little chica…swarm without…”

“…should have…”

“…STRAIGHT YOU SHOULD HAVE!”

“…HELP HIM, IDIOT!”

“WITHOUT ASKING?”

The buzzing was fading. His spatial awareness sharpened, then snapped into sight and his body felt…good. Effortless.

“…NEVER WOULD HAVE LET ME IF I HADN’T-”

“Enough,” Reaper growled. “McCree, put her down. Sombra, shut up.”

The sudden, sullen silence was a relief. Reaper sat up, climbed to his feet, and stretched. “That’s better,” he announced. “Now. Sombra. What did you do to me?”

The hacker looked nervous. Good.

“I’ve been studying your swarm,” she said, not nearly as composed as she was trying to sound. “Its programming is a mess. I’m surprised it even held you together. So I cleaned up the code a little and set your current shape as the default, told it to hold the default unless you tell it to do something else.”

So that’s why his body felt so effortless. He’d been holding himself together for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to not have to concentrate on doing that. Cautiously, he told one hand to dissolve and then pulled it back together. There was almost no resistance, the nanites obeying instantly.

“You still should have asked his permission first,” McCree growled.

Reaper snorted. “She’s right. I never would have let her.”

“I can do more,” she said quietly. “If you let me.”

“I’m sure you can.” Reaper flexed his hand. “The question is: why would you? What do you get out of this?”

“Assurance that you won’t want to kill me if Talon thinks I’m a threat?” she asked, her voice back to brassy defiance.

“Try again.”

Her eyes flicked to McCree, standing with his arms crossed, scowling. “You called him your dad,” she said. He nodded. “You’re Jesse McCree, orphaned, former member of the Deadlock Gang before it was raided. Joined Blackwatch at seventeen.”

“Tell me somethin’ every two-bit hooker this side of the Rio Grande doesn’t know,” he said evenly.

Her voice, her eyes, were just as even. “On your twenty-first birthday, you were officially adopted by Gabriel Reyes, the hero of the Omnic Crisis.” Those purple eyes fixed unflinchingly onto Reaper’s mask. “I’ve looked up to you since I was a child. Nothing that happened shook my faith in you. I know how corrupt the governments are, how they strangled Overwatch. I didn’t know you survived. Not until I came here. You saved the world and got stabbed in the back for it; the least I can do in return is use my skills to help you.”

Jesse’s hostility drained out of him; Reaper didn’t relax. “You started studying my swarm before you knew that,” he growled.

“I did.” Sombra didn’t even blink. “At first, I just wanted to see what made you tick in case I needed an ace up my sleeve. But I suspected you were ex-Overwatch because McCree was too relaxed around you, and then he called you Dad. I figured even if I was wrong and you weren’t Gabriel Reyes, a little insurance never hurt.”

“Smart girl. Just one thing.”

Sombra stiffened.

“The only ones at Talon who know that are in this room. Did you check for surveillance devices?” Not that there were any, of course. He just wanted to know if she’d known that.

She shot him a dirty look. “Of course.”

“Good. Don’t say my name out loud again. And discuss any changes you want to make to my swarm with me before you make them. Got it?”

“Got it. Question?”

Reaper sighed. “What is it?”

The look she gave him was like a child seeing Santa in the mall for the first time, a miracle made flesh converting the skeptic into a believer. “Can I call you Papi?”

McCree sniggered.

Briefly, Reaper wished he had lips to smirk with. “Fine. Now go to bed, both of you. It’s late.”

“Night again, Dad,” Jesse said, giving him his usual one-armed hug.

The instant he let go, Sombra was there with her arms wrapped around Reaper’s waist. “Buenas noches, Papi,” she said softly. Then she scurried off to her room, leaving the other two to watch her go.

“You really okay?” Jesse asked softly.

He hmphed. “Best I’ve been since everything went to hell. Go sleep, Jesse.”

The cowboy hugged him again. “Alright. See you in the morning.”

Reaper watched as Jesse strolled back to his room, then retreated into his own room and turned off the lights. Without the need to maintain his own form, the meditation exercises that usually failed to do anything for him actually quieted his mind and for the first time in months, possibly over a year, Reaper slept.

“Jesus Christ, Jack!”

Gabriel rolled to the side, feeling a sting in his right arm that told him he hadn’t moved fast enough to avoid being shot. He gripped the wound with the other hand, putting pressure on it while cautiously peering around the door into the Strike-Commander’s office. The dead woman on the floor had a nametag reading Sotomayor on her Blackwatch uniform, but her face was one he’d never seen. There was a knife in her hand and a good amount of blood splashed around, but it looked like Jack had killed her with his sidearm. The same one he’d just shot Gabriel with.

“What happened?” he asked, concern for his husband choking him. It was hard to tell how much of the blood on Jack’s face was his.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Jack snarled, expression hard. The pistol in his hand didn’t waver. “This was one of your agents, Gabriel.”

“No. She’s wearing a Blackwatch uniform, but I’ve never seen her.”

“Just like you never sent those orders?”

Gabriel felt his temper surge but pushed it back down. “Jack, listen to me! I didn’t authorize those missions. I didn’t send those orders. And this woman? This is proof that someone has been sticking their fingers in our business! If you would just let me dig into-”

“You mean violate UN regulations on private data and unauthorized background checks?” Jack demanded coldly. “That would make us just as bad as the shitty government we grew up with. For the last time, no.”

“Jack…”

“She tried to kill me, Gabriel.”

Each word was hard and sharp, and Gabriel wasn’t sure if what he was feeling was shock from the wound in his arm, or from the way his husband was looking at him.

“One of your agents-”

“She’s not one of my agents! Jack, listen to me. Please. I know things have been strained between us and I’ve used some pretty unorthodox methods, but you can’t honestly believe that I would ever want you dead! For better or for worse, remember?”

“I remember,” Jack said, his voice low and ominous. “Until death do us part.”

He put the pistol on his desk and Gabriel watched, frozen in place, as he worked the titanium wedding band from his finger.

“I trusted you with my life,” he said quietly. “But as far as I’m concerned, the man I married is dead.”

The ring glinted as it flew through the air, impacted against Gabriel’s shoulder and fell to the floor with a ting before rolling across the hallway to fall over against the opposite wall. Gabriel watched its motion, then turned to look at the man standing behind the Strike-Commander’s desk. Jack Morrison may as well have been facing a complete stranger.

“Get out.”

Recoiling in shock, he took two steps back and the door closed automatically. He didn’t even feel the pain of his gunshot wound as he picked the ring up with blood-slicked fingers and staggered towards the medical wing.

Numb and stunned as he was, the explosions didn’t even make him flinch. He kept his left hand pressed over the wound, ring jammed onto one finger, and used his right to shoot anyone who looked to be shooting at him. Gabriel was pretty sure that he hadn’t managed to remain unscathed by the time the door slid open and an alarmed Angela Ziegler practically threw him onto a stretcher, but he didn’t feel anything over the agony of his husband saying the man I married is dead.

Angela was saying something about blood loss, damage, sedation, experimental treatment, but he didn’t care. She placed a mask over his face, and the world went dark.

He woke up in what he vaguely recognized as an auxiliary medical facility of some sort, with an exhausted-looking Jesse McCree slumped over in the chair against the wall, asleep. The cowboy looked dirty – sooty, maybe – and more than a little worse for the wear. Two rings, his and Jack’s, sat on the bedside table next to a glass of water, and memory surged up to remind him all over again that Jack had-

Weak as he was, he forced his arm to move, sweeping the rings to the floor. The soft chiming brought Jesse surging to his feet, ready to fight, but he relaxed again at seeing Gabriel awake.

“Hey, Dad,” he said softly, dragging the chair closer and crouching to pick up the rings.

“Don’t.”

Jesse froze. “Why not?”

He closed his eyes, but couldn’t entirely prevent wetness from leaking out. “It’s over.”

“You’re right. You’ve been out for a few days, but…Overwatch is gone.”

Somehow, he wasn’t surprised.

“Bunch of strangers in Blackwatch uniforms were running around killing Overwatch agents. Bombs everywhere. You me and Angela, we just barely escaped. Someone with a sniper rifle got you at least once and I figured you were a goner, but whatever Angela injected you with must be pretty amazing because the wounds started to patch themselves up right before my damned eyes. Figure you could survive pretty much anything now.”

Jesse’s words trickled to a halt, and an awkward silence fell.

“They didn’t find the Strike-Commander’s body. And someone saw the sniper get you, because you’re being reported dead, too.”

Gabriel didn’t say anything. What do you say when the only part of your world that isn’t a ruin is sitting next to you?

“It’s been a rough couple of days,” Jesse said finally, sounding as tired as he looked. “I’m gonna go get somethin’ to help me sleep. I’ll pick up some for you, too.”

“Thanks.” That one word was all he could force through his tight throat.

Eyes shut, he listened as his cowboy son stood and set the rings on the bedside table before walking slowly out of the room. Once the door had closed, he rolled over and pressed his face into his pillow, hoping that it would smother his sobs if not his body.

Gabriel lay in the bathtub, ignoring the chemical scents rising from the bathwater. The door to his hospital room was locked, as was the door to its adjoining bathroom, and he’d disabled smoke detectors and fire-suppression systems in both. The bathroom door was sealed and barricaded as well as he could manage, and the window was open for airflow. He had enough alcohol to ensure that at a minimum, he wouldn’t be able to sabotage himself, and possibly enough knock him out completely. As an extra precaution, he’d found a sedative pre-loaded into a syringe, and once he was in position, he jammed it into his thigh.

He drank quickly, neither noticing nor caring whether the liquor was good or bad, and lit the cigar he’d talked Jesse into giving him. The accelerants in the bathwater would see to it that there was nothing left but ash when the fire was done with him, and he nestled down in the tub until the water came up to his jaw. When he stopped being able to hold the cigar out of the water…

The man I married is dead.

The rings in his hand mocked him, and he stuck the cigar between his teeth.

Time to make good on his promise.