moonshadows

Sombra hadn’t expected that the events of the previous night would make either of her…roommates…warm up to her, so McCree’s stilted politeness as he offered her breakfast wasn’t a surprise. She declined politely, which got him frowning in sharp disapproval, but before either of them could say anything a cloud of black smoke billowed out from under Reaper’s door.

“Dad!”

The cowboy abandoned his post by the stove, leaving Sombra to move the skillet and turn the burner off. When she turned around, he was kneeling on the floor with his arms open, and Reaper was an agitated mass of particles curdling in front of him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, practically demanding an answer with badly-concealed alarm.

“Nightmare. He’s too shook up to hold his shape. Dad, can you hear me? You’re okay, you’re safe!”

Sombra stuck one arm into the billowing cloud and sent a simple command; the swarm acknowledged it and snapped Reaper into his default form to curl up into a shuddering ball, McCree’s meaty arms holding him tight as he murmured reassurance. Feeling like an outsider, she hovered for a moment before kneeling beside McCree and lending her arms to the hug.

It was a handful of minutes before Reaper calmed down enough to mutter ‘thank you’ and push away from both of them.

“Remembered everything going to hell,” he said in answer to a question McCree hadn’t asked.

The cowboy shot Sombra a venomous look. She held her hands up in disavowal.

“It was because of what she did, but it wasn’t her fault.” Reaper stood slowly and took a few steps towards the table. “I was actually able to sleep, for once.”

Sombra’s eyes widened as she caught the implication. “You mean…since you became what you are, you haven’t slept enough to have processed the trauma of becoming like that.”

He nodded as he sat heavily in the closest chair, clawed gauntlets covering his mask in a gesture of exhaustion.

“Papi…” she breathed. “Oh no, Papi, that’s terrible.”

McCree quirked an inquisitive eyebrow at her as they stood to follow Reaper to the table.

“I’ve been through that,” Sombra said softly as she took the seat next to Reaper.

“You?” the cowboy spat as he turned the burner back on and prodded the contents of the skillet.

“She’s in an omnic body,” Reaper growled.

That was enough of a bombshell that McCree turned the burner off again and sat across from her. “Really. That’s…” He coughed awkwardly. “Y’don’t…look…omnic.”

It was Sombra’s turn to quirk an eyebrow at him. “You mean you’re trying to come to terms with the fact that you jerked it to an inorganic body.”

“It’s a very nice body,” he muttered, flushing. “But…food…”

“She never ate it,” Reaper growled. “I did.”

Both of them looked a bit startled at that. Sombra recovered first.

“So a few years back, I realized that augmentation would only get me so far, and I wanted to be the best. It took a lot of time and a lot more money, but I got a meeting with the Tehuacán Omnium and promised certain things in exchange for…” She gestured to her body. “Downside…I don’t sleep the same way. Crap builds up in my subconscious until it spills out as concentrated nightmares.”

“And is that the only downside?” McCree asked skeptically.

“If you think never being able to eat all the things I can smell isn’t a downside, think again.”

Reaper snorted. “At least you can smell.”

The look Sombra gave him was one part affront, one part incredulity, and three parts determination.

“Okay,” she declared. “I know what my next project is.”

An urgent missive interrupted the monotony of the afternoon, hand-delivered by a flunky Reaper neither knew nor cared to learn the name of. He read it over twice before snorting.

McCree looked up from where he and Sombra had been talking. “Boss?”

“We have a mission. And by that I mean you have a mission,” he said, pointing to the hacker, “but it’s high enough priority that you get an escort. McCree, suit up.”

The cowboy stood up from the couch. “Yessir.”

“Sombra.”

She whirled, startled into paying attention to Reaper again instead of following the retreating motion of McCree’s hips as he sauntered to his room.

“Do you have a mission outfit?”

One eyebrow arched at him. “Does it look like I came with luggage?”

Reaper crossed his arms. “Do I look like I believe for a split second that you didn’t have half a wardrobe shipped to you within your first two days here? I asked if you have a mission outfit.”

The look on her face – one part guilt and one part embarrassment – was answer enough.

“We’ll rectify that later. Get dressed in the most badass black outfit you have.”

“Yes sir,” she muttered, beating a hasty retreat to her room.

To Reaper’s surprise, she emerged first. The silver-studded black leather jacket and matching knee-high boots might have been overkill in other circumstances, especially paired with the vinyl pants and fingerless gloves, but in the context of a Talon hacker being escorted by Reaper, it was perfect. McCree came out of his room a moment later, and it was…gratifying…to see Sombra’s eyes widen at the change in his cowboy.

Gone was the laid-back, goofy man and in his place was the deadly mercenary who’d earned the nickname Deadeye before he’d even crossed paths with the commander of Blackwatch. His usual worn jeans and flannel shirts had been traded for sleek body armor, black accented with brassy pieces on his chest, shoulders, waist, and the brim of his black-and-red Stetson. His jacket – tailored to account for the mechanical arm – flared just under his chest to flow dramatically down to his calves in a deliberate mirroring of Reaper’s. His face, normally open and friendly, now wore a stony and impassive expression.

“Good,” Reaper practically purred as Sombra’s expression shifted to something that matched her outfit, haughty and disdainful and almost sneering. “Let’s go.”

One of the few simple pleasures Reaper still had was watching Talon goons scramble to get out of his way when they saw him coming, as if they were afraid he would not only run them over but also suck the living essence from their very bodies. He worked with Talon, yes, but they were the means to the end of burning down the governments that had burned down his life. They did not own his loyalty, and they owned even less of Jesse’s. The cowboy had made it very clear to Reaper that he was only there because he refused to abandon his adopted father, something Reaper was more grateful for than he could bring himself to admit.

Today was no exception; the goons blanched and scrambled, and soon enough the three of them were on their way to Egypt.

“We acquired a cache of data from Helix,” Reaper said once they were in the air. “Apparently, it’s in less than useable condition. Your mission, Sombra, is to rectify that situation.”

“Helix,” she repeated. “Giza?” At his nod, she glanced towards the pilot. “You set me to keep an eye on a certain target. Last known data points suggest Giza is the target’s destination.”

Reaper leaned back in his seat, arms crossed. “Well, well, well. Business and pleasure on this trip.”

Hakim met them himself, bowing obsequiously and ushering them inside where offers of various refreshments were met with stony silence until they were withdrawn.

“You have data,” Reaper said coldly.

One of Hakim’s goons entered, bearing a storage device. Sombra touched it, spread her other hand, and screens opened up.

“This is incomplete,” she announced in disapproval. “There’s holes everywhere. Entire subdirectories are missing.”

“That’s all we have,” Hakim protested. “Helix locked things down after the incident. We’ll have to find another way in.”

Reaper hmphed. “No excuses. For your sake, hope Sombra can get something useful out of this.”

One of Hakim’s men gestured for Sombra to follow him to a room where she could examine the cache, and McCree stood up to go with her. Just in case.

“Helix will have a weakness,” Reaper continued as they left the room. “They don’t know what they’re protecting.” Once he was alone with Hakim, he growled, “There’s a second reason I’m here. You reported…difficulties…and were given instructions. Any progress on our ghost?”

The change in subject did nothing to put Hakim at ease. “Nothing. He’s slipped off the radar the last few days.”

Reaper hmphed again. “Well…keep at it. Once you set a trap, you never know what will fall into it.”

As if on queue, they straightened at the sound of rapid gunfire from outside, a chattering that cut off as suddenly as it started.

“I’ll take care of this,” Reaper announced, flowing out of the room as a stream of black smoke.

An unfortunately familiar voice demanded Where is he? as Reaper entered the courtyard, and he cursed silently at the fact that he’d have an audience for this iteration of their little song and dance. Maybe more than one audience; the way his luck was going, the ‘ghost’ would pick today to show up. The silver lining was that Reaper had been there, in Zurich, when everything went to hell. He could play to one audience while showing his cards to the other, and no one in Talon would be the wiser.

Hopefully.

He solidified a good six feet behind Soldier 76.

“Right here, Jack,” he snarled in answer to the man’s shouted question.

At this range, even a close miss would be painful. Reaper aimed for the very edge of the soldier’s hip and fired, sending him to the ground without doing any serious damage.

“Always rushing in,” he taunted. “I know your every move before you even think it. Always have. Always will.”

Except for that day in Zurich, but he doubted the man was thinking clearly enough at the moment to remember that. He tried to come up with something the actual Reaper would say in this situation.

“I’ve been looking for you since Switzerland. Knew it’d take more than that to kill you. Now here you are. This is how it should have been.”

For a moment, he wondered if that was too over-the-top, but considering how over-the-top the getup was, he figured he was good. Then something hit his right shoulder.

In the next instant, faster than he could turn his head to look around for the sniper, a shot whizzed past him to hit Soldier 76 in the shoulder – only that shot seemed to heal him. Or maybe it was just a very good painkiller, because the man declared that his pain was gone.

Then a voice he never thought he’d hear again shouted, “GET IN THERE, JACK!”

Before he could recover from the shock of learning that Ana wasn’t dead, he’d been tackled onto his back and gloved fists were doing their best to pummel the face he didn’t have under the mask. Anger surged up – how dare he act like this wasn’t all his fault, how dare she take his side after he left her for dead? – and somehow Reaper was on his feet, trading punches with Soldier 76 because he didn’t deserve a name, not after everything he’d done.

Just as he knocked the soldier to the ground, something hit his forearm and he decided he’d had just about enough of that. A combination of misting and then using the quantum entanglement of his nanite swarm let him translocate up to her perch. He’d just identified her as the ‘ghost’ that had been giving Hakim a hard time when she drew a sidearm and shot him in the neck with dome kind of dart – a tranquilizer or maybe a sleep agent. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have a bloodstream for it to work on, and he plucked it from his neck with a bark of almost-laughter.

“Hakim’s been trying to draw out the one who’s been sabotaging our operations,” he said as he slapped the weapon out of her hand. “I never expected that it’d be you…a real ghost.”

If he sounded a little bitter, well, he was. Granted he was working with limited data, but it sure as hell looked like Ana’s ‘death’ had been a deliberate lie told by the two people he’d trusted most.

“Not to mention him. Guess we old soldiers are hard to kill,” Reaper snarled as she lashed out with one foot, trying to knock him off-balance and succeeding. “But I should have known. You always took his side.”

One hand flashed out to grab him by the throat and he hurled himself backwards, taking her with him as he fell to the packed earth of the courtyard. While she had him on his back, she reached out and pulled the mask off.

Part of him was surprised it came off; he’d certainly never tried to remove it. But a dark part of him wasn’t surprised at all, because it was part of his body and his body fell apart on a regular basis. He assumed his face was a seething mass of darkness, or possibly something resembling a charred skull, because she recoiled with a gasp and dropped the mask.

“What happened to you?” she demanded in horror.

The man I married is dead.

“He did this to me, Ana.” Memories of that day, of the attack that would never have happened except that the UN had tied their hands and Jack had let them, welled up and stole the tiny bit of satisfaction he’d felt at her reaction. “They left me to become this thing.”

“Gabriel…”

Hearing his name, if anything, made him feel worse.

“They left you to die,” he spat, letting his form dissolve and causing Ana to catch herself with one hand as she fell backwards. “They left me to suffer. Never forget that.”

Reaper dissolved completely, letting an errant breeze carry him into the sky and then swirling down to re-form out of sight on the catwalk overlooking the main gate. He couldn’t hear what the other two were saying, but he watched as Ana stood and Soldier 76 took off his visor for a minute. They exchanged more words Reaper couldn’t hear, and then Soldier 76 climbed to his feet and they walked out of the compound together.

Hakim looked ready to collapse at the first sudden movement when Reaper swirled back into the room and solidified. Soldier 76 had obviously known he was there, and he couldn’t have gotten that information unless it had been leaked somehow, which meant there was a good chance Hakim had bugged the room. The half of his brain that wasn’t seething at the way that encounter had gone was frantically reviewing what had been said and trying to guess what a listener might be able to put together from that.

“Status on the data,” he barked.

Hakim swallowed. “Uh…Sombra said she could make something useful of it but that it would take time.”

“Then we’re done here.”

He was halfway to the door before Hakim found his voice and nervously asked, “What about the ghost?”

Reaper paused, gauntlet-fists clenching. “I doubt you’ll have any more issues on that front,” he snarled. Because of course Ana would be going wherever Soldier 76 went. He’d have Sombra keep tracking them.

Before Hakim could muster a response to that, he’d left the room to find his hacker and his cowboy.

It was a quiet flight back.