moonshadows

Sombra retreated to her room as soon as they returned to their suite, which Reaper cared about only because it meant he could discuss things with McCree in privacy. It didn’t take McCree long to change into less formal clothes. While the cowboy rummaged around in the fridge and assembled a monstrosity of a sandwich, Reaper sat at the table and considered how best to phrase his bombshell.

“So what was all the commotion?” McCree asked as he sat down with his sandwich and popped open a can of beer.

“Old friend showed up,” Reaper began. “Did some playing to whatever audience was listening, since I don’t trust Hakim as far as I can throw him.”

McCree took a huge bite of the sandwich. “Mm-hmm?”

Reaper sighed. “And then Ana shot me.”

The cowboy nearly choked.

“Yes, she’s alive,” he continued as McCree struggled with his oversized mouthful. “She lost the eye. I didn’t hurt her. She recognized both of us and ripped my mask off.”

Finally, with the aid of a healthy swig of beer, McCree succeeded in swallowing his bite. “That must’ve been a shock.”

“Considering the look on her face, yes. I assume I look…inhuman.”

“So…” The cowboy picked up his sandwich, reconsidered, and put it back down. “Does this change anything?”

For a long moment, possibilities and fantasies he could never put into words swam before him. He shoved them away.

“Yeah,” he said darkly, standing up from the table. “It means we have two targets to be careful of instead of just one.”

He stalked into his room, grabbed a pad, and flung himself onto the bed. There were intelligence reports to sort through, missions to arrange, and right now he really, really wanted to kill someone.

After several hours of arguing with corrupted and incomplete data, Sombra needed a break. She was fairly certain she could get a cleaner copy hacking into Helix herself, but that would require an ally be physically present inside Helix and anyway, she didn’t really want Talon knowing exactly how good she was. So she stretched and sauntered out to see if anything interesting was happening.

Jesse was on the couch watching something on a pad. Reaper was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’d the boss go?” she asked as she perched on the arm of the couch.

“Mission,” he answered idly without looking up. “He needed to vent some frustration. You got any questions, ask ‘em now because he’s not gonna want to talk about it.”

Slowly, Sombra moved from the arm of the couch to the end opposite the cowboy, knees tucked up under her chin. “I know the Shrike showed up,” she said quietly. “I know…your other dad…showed up as well. Anything else important enough that I should know?”

Jesse McCree sighed. “Yeah. The Shrike is an Egyptian sniper who knows both of them from the Crisis. Don’t say her name, but it is who you think it is.”

“Makes sense. Boss asked me to keep tabs on him; I’ll add her to that.”

For a minute, they sat in awkward silence.

“I want to help him,” she said in a soft, determined voice. “I want to find a way to give back everything he’s lost.”

The cowboy looked away, one hand going to his chest. “Don’t get yer hopes up. Some things, it’s not up to you to give back.”

The implications were something she didn’t want to discuss, but she filed them away for later. “I want to restore his body,” she clarified.

“Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

Sombra reached one bare foot out to nudge his thigh, just hard enough to express annoyance without being a kick. “You want him to have his body back, or not?”

“Of course I do!” He glared at her, shoving her foot away. “But he burned to death, and I don’t see how hacking is gonna change that!”

“I didn’t ask if you had any ideas,” she snapped. “That’s my job to figure out. But for that, I need data. Information. I need to know what happened.”

The anger drained out of Jesse’s face, leaving a startling amount of pain and sadness. She’d seen expressions of loss like that before, too many times. Parents who had lost children. Children who had lost parents. She’d seen it on her own face as a child, something she’d tried very hard to forget.

“Jesse,” she said, squeezing his hand reassuringly and then glancing down in surprise. Without realizing it, she’d taken his hand between hers. “I can help him. His nanites, they’re constantly building his body. But they’re only smart enough to build what’s already there. If I can program them the right way, I can tell them how to build him a body that’s not just ash.”

It was only partially a surprise when she found herself crushed to his chest, smelling the spicy musk of him and feeling the warmth that radiated from his body. Her teenage self would have killed to have Jesse McCree hold her like this, and angrily she started to dismiss her old fantasies. She wasn’t human anymore, he wasn’t a charismatic young man, and they weren’t going to miraculously fall in love and live glamorously ever after with Papi Gabriel beaming proudly at them.

But…

It was true, frilly romantic fantasies weren’t anything either of them would be interested in anymore. She didn’t have a human body, but he was still attracted to the one she had. And he wasn’t the young buck she’d fantasized about, but there was still warmth and tenderness under his gruff exterior. As for Papi Gabriel…well…she was determined to restore his body, right?

Maybe…maybe fantasies more in line with her current reality wouldn’t be so…unrealistic.

“I was the one who found him,” Jesse said roughly. “It wasn’t even a week after everything went to hell. We were staying with Angela, and Dad was having a real rough time. I guess…other dad…had said some things before shit went down, and then of course he was reported dead, body missing. Dad asked me to get him something strong so he didn’t have to deal with remembering during the night. Asked me for a cigar, too, to settle his nerves. Woke up in the middle of the night because I smelled smoke…”

The door to the medical room had been blocked with something, but not well enough that Jesse couldn’t open it with a little brute force. The smoke wasn’t too bad…yet…but still not something he wanted to breathe. It took a few seconds to find a surgical mask and slip it on.

The door to the bathroom was hot, too hot to touch with anything but his left hand, and he could hear the flames crackling.

“Dad!”

He knew it was too late, that Gabriel couldn’t hear him, but he couldn’t stop himself from yelling any more than he could stop the tears that welled up. The bathroom door was blocked better; it didn’t budge and he punched it in frustration before looking around for something to use as a battering ram.

As he worked, slamming some piece of medical equipment into the doorknob again and again, he kept his mind off of the inevitable by trying to work out logistics. Gabriel had disabled the fire alarm system, that much was clear. He had to have used accelerants for the fire to get this hot; the door would normally be bending under his blows, but it was starting to crack and splinter, and he retreated long enough to stuff a wet washcloth under his mask to protect his lungs from the superheated air on the other side before returning. He’d be battering a hole in the damn thing before he got the latch to give, no doubt. Accelerants meant water would probably be useless for extinguishing the fire, and he didn’t have much faith in the little fire extinguisher he’d found in a cabinet.

When the door finally gave, it was because he’d broken it nearly into halves, and he paused to evaluate the situation.

Plus side: the main fire seemed to have burned itself out, and all that was left were the secondary fires – the walls, the ceiling, the door.

Minus side: the main fire had been in the bathtub, and he could see from here that there was nothing left but gritty, sandy ash.

Angela came running in as he got the last of the secondary fires out – little fire extinguisher was more of a trooper than he’d given it credit for – and she stopped in the doorway, both hands over her mouth, pink bathrobe tied loosely around her waist.

“Your face,” she whispered, but he could guess what she wasn’t saying. His skin felt tight and hot, and he probably looked like he’d spent all day in the sun before rolling in soot. Then she saw the bathtub and started crying, and he put the spent fire extinguisher down to walk her to the living room and sit her down with a mug of tea.

While he was there, Jesse rummaged in her kitchen cabinets until he found a big, ceramic pitcher and a serving spoon that didn’t look like it got used much. A small garbage bag (biodegradable, meant to go in the compost bin) and a well-worn pastry brush rounded out his preparations and he went back to the half-destroyed bathroom to transfer his dad’s remains to a more dignified resting place.

He couldn’t blame Gabriel, he thought as he scooped the sandy stuff into the pitcher. Whatever had gone down between him and Jack, well…Jesse knew how bad things would have had to be for his dad to not wear his wedding ring. Both rings were sitting in the ashes, a little discolored but otherwise undamaged by the fire. He brushed the ash away from them before picking them up, tears spilling down his cheeks again as he saw and read the inscriptions he hadn’t known were there. Roughly, he wiped his eyes and tucked the rings into a pocket.

Then he noticed the movement.

He’d used the pastry brush to gather the spread-out bits into a pile, but scooping them up with a spoon meant that pile got a little messy. As he watched, the scattered particles slowly moved back towards the rest of the pile. A hallucination, he thought. An optical illusion. Had to be. To prove it, he took a spoonful and made a neat little line away from the rest of the pile. Then he went back to scooping and brushing, transferring ash from the bottom of the tub to the pitcher. When he was done, he looked at the line again.

It had turned into a neat little circular pile.

Hands shaking, Jesse brushed it into the spoon and dumped it into the pitcher with the rest. It was just the nanites, he told himself. The fire hadn’t destroyed them. That’s all it was.

But he couldn’t shake the hope that more than just the nanites had survived.

Angela wasn’t surprised when he packed up his duffle bag and left the next day, pitcher of ash swaddled protectively in a bath towel and tucked into a backpack along with his Peacekeeper and both of Gabriel’s shotguns. She hugged him, they cried, and then he was hiking down the private drive like a moderately well-to-do hobo.

The first thing he did was transfer a sizeable chunk of his bank account to something more anonymous. Then he found a place that would rent him a room and not ask questions. He went to a liquor store and made sure he wouldn’t have to sober up for a week, bought a family’s worth of fast food from a burger joint, and settled in to either test a theory or mourn. Probably both.

The first thing Jesse discovered, when he tried to pull the bag out of the pitcher, was that the nanites had eaten it. He supposed that made sense, what with it being a plant-based plastic and all. He poured a double shot of whiskey into the pitcher and dropped in a handful of fries while he ate. By the time he’d finished his cheeseburger, the fries had vanished.

Still didn’t prove anything.

The next few days passed in a blur of alcohol and take-out. He found himself talking to the ashes, which he’d poured into an aluminum lasagna pan he’d found in a dumpster. It would have been creepier, seeing burgers and fries slowly sink under the surface, if he hadn’t been so drunk. “I don’t know what to do, Dad,” he slurred, head on his arm as he watched the swarm devour its dinner. “I can’t tell Angela. Would break her heart. But I got no one else to tell.”

He took a swig of whiskey, poured a swig into the ashes, and settled in to sleep with his head on the cheap desk next to what may or may not have been his father.

It was a sound that woke him, the squeak of the floor and the realization that someone was in his personal space. Instincts surged into action and his mechanical left hand shot out in a blind nut punch while with his right, he grabbed the bottle he’d been drinking out of and lunged to his feet swinging. Both blows connected, and Jesse squinted blearily at the crumpled figure on the floor. Black armor, clawed gauntlets, the thing that couldn’t decide if it was a hooded cloak or a coat, and a mask like a stylized owl skull.

“You gotta be shitting me,” he muttered, setting the broken bottle on the desk.

After fifteen, maybe twenty years being at the top of Blackwatch’s hit list, he’d finally gotten a shot at the international mercenary known only as ‘Reaper’ and he’d taken the man out with a whiskey bottle and a below-the-belt hit.

“Good thing I was all suited up,” he muttered as he stumbled over to his duffle bag and rummaged around in it for something to tie a prisoner op with.

In surprisingly short order, the mercenary had been secured and dumped into the bathtub, and a plan that was probably not a smart idea was percolating in his half-inebriated brain. Jesse fumbled with the mask until he found the catches that made it release and splashed tap water onto the man’s face until he sputtered awake.

Annoyingly, the man under the mask looked completely Caucasian. Fair skin, fair hair, and blue-green eyes. So much for Dad’s theory that the mask indicated Mexican ancestry, he thought.

“Buenos dias, fuckface,” Jesse said brightly. “I’m guessin’ you were hired to kill me. Now, no worries, I ain’t holding a grudge. But I do want some information. How people contact you, how they pay you, that sort of thing. I don’t suppose you got any contact info for Talon?”

“What makes you think I’m going to tell you any of that?” the mercenary snarled with – was that a New Jersey accent?

Good thing Gabriel was dead, Jesse thought, because he’d never have to know what an insult this was. Or maybe this was insulting enough that he’d come back to life just to punish this hijo de puta.

“Oh, maybe because I’m working through some heavy shit like the death of everyone I cared for and this ain’t the kind of place that’s eager to call in law enforcement, if you get my drift. I learned how to be real nasty from my dad, and he was wanting to get his hands on you for a long time, so there’s a whole bunch I’m pretty darn eager to do to you in his honor.”

The man glared at him.

“You know you ain’t getting out of here alive,” Jesse pointed out pleasantly. “We do this the easy way, you tell me what I want to know and I put one between your eyes. You make things difficult, it’s gonna hurt.”

Still, the man said nothing.

Jesse shrugged. “Okay. No skin off of my nose.”

By the time ‘Reaper’ had grudgingly given Jesse all the information he’d asked for, it was late enough that dinner was sounding good – but he still had to deal with his prisoner. He sauntered out of the bathroom and cast a sober eye over the pan of ashes, examining their texture. It seemed somehow more fluid than it should be, not quite like mud but something like quicksand. Scooping up a bit with the broken bottle and pouring it through the neck confirmed that it definitely flowed more than it had before. He searched the collection of empties for something with a longer neck and carefully broke the bottom to form a makeshift funnel. Not trusting the control he’d have pouring from the pan, he emptied the pan back into the pitcher. Then he emptied every open bottle or can into it, watching as the liquid was absorbed almost instantly, and added water from the sink until he had a pitcher of thin mud.

“Time for dinner,” Jesse announced grimly, although whether he was talking to the man, the swarm, or both was up for debate. He shoved the neck of the bottle into his prisoner’s mouth, and duct tape held it in place nicely. “Hope you’re hungry.”

Carefully, metal hand holding his prisoner’s head still, he poured the pitcher into the broken end of the bottle and watched as it drained down the man’s throat. He thrashed at first, then settled down to glare at his captor while he swallowed with determination. After about half the contents – he guessed the pitcher held about two liters, and it had been filled almost completely – the man started thrashing again. Jesse kept pouring, but slower. The fight seemed to go out of him and he gave up the struggle, breathing heavily and looking as miserable as could be expected.

Finally, the pitcher was empty and the man slumped in the tub, eyes closed in defeat or possibly just sheer discomfort. Jesse peeled the tape away, removed the bottle, and slammed the man’s head against the wall until he was out cold again. Then he put the mask back in place and hauled his prisoner out to lean against the toilet.

One hot shower later, Jesse dumped him back in the tub and changed into clean clothes. There was a pizza place around the corner, near the liquor store, and he was back with a six-pack and a large supreme within half an hour. He sprawled on the bed, turned the TV to a random action movie to mask any suspicious sounds, and settled in to have dinner…and wait. Maybe he was being a fool, and Gabriel was really dead. But maybe he wasn’t, and the swarm just needed enough of the right material to rebuild him. Either way, the mercenary would no longer be a problem.

A few hours later, noise from the bathroom caught his attention and he paused the movie to listen. Shuffling, like someone climbing unsteadily to their feet. Footsteps, slow and uncertain. A clawed gauntlet gripped the doorframe, and Reaper stumbled into view.

“Why the fuck am I alive?” he growled. “I thought I killed myself.”

Jesse’s heart leaped into his throat, and it took effort to keep his voice steady.

“Morning, Dad,” he drawled, saluting his resurrected father with a can of beer. “How’d you like some pizza and revenge?”

“You didn’t,” laughed Sombra from where she was curled pleasantly against his side.

“I did,” he said proudly. “I had plenty of time to think up the perfect line.”

“So he joined Talon for revenge on the governments that screwed Overwatch over, and you…”

“I wasn’t about to abandon my dad,” Jesse said softly, hugging her a little tighter against him.

She played with his fingers for a few moments, head on his shoulder. “You’re a good son,” she said, just as softly. “He’s lucky to have you.”

“Naw, I’m just repaying everything he’s done for me.” Jesse looked away, sure he was blushing.

“Did you ever…tell…Angela?”

He shook his head. “Haven’t talked to her since I left. Figured it would be kinder to let her think Dad was dead than tell her what happened. You really think you can help him?”

Sombra sat up and stretched. “It’ll take some work, but I can do it.” She stilled, looking away so he couldn’t see her expression. “Thank you for telling me. You didn’t have to go into detail like that.”

He leaned over, hugging her from behind, being careful to keep his touch chaste. “I don’t have many people I can confide in,” he said in a low voice. “I haven’t told that story to anyone except Dad, but it felt good to share. Thanks for listening, and if you ever need an ear…”

Her hands covered his, and she leaned back into his embrace. “I don’t have many people I can confide in, either. Maybe after I get some work done…I can share a story or two with you.”

“Ma’am,” he drawled, “it would be my genuine pleasure.”

He watched as she sauntered back into her room, waiting until the door had shut before he leaned back and let the goofy grin spread across his face.