STTA 9: Change of heart

[moonshadows]

Reaper had been looking forward to an evening alone, with McCree and Sombra out on their ‘not a date’ excursion, but less than an hour later there was an urgent message for him blinking on his desk.

Annoyed, he slapped the connection open and growled, “What?”

The excited man on the other end wasn’t one he recognized, but he was at the security desk in the detention block. He threw Reaper an enthusiastic salute. “As per your orders, sir, Soldier Seventy-Six has been incapacitated and captured. He’s waiting for you in cell R.”

Morrison had been captured? Was he still traveling with- “What about the Shrike?”

“Got away, sir.”

That was more of a relief than Reaper wanted to admit to. “Fine. I’ll be right there.” Except that cell R was reserved for prisoners Talon expected him to feed his swarm with, and while he wasn’t going to kill Morrison, he didn’t necessarily want to risk the man saying anything incriminating where other ears could hear, either. “Is he still incapacitated?”

The guard started. “Uh…yes, sir.”

“Good. Prepare him for transport. I want to take him someplace with more room for me to work.”

The guard saluted again. “I’ll take care of it.”

“See that you do.”

Reaper slapped the connection closed and dissolved, flowing through the air vents and out into the detention block. Morrison had been secured with shackles around his wrists and ankles, and two of Sullivan’s squad were hauling him down the corridor to a transport van.

“There’s an abandoned building near where we picked him up,” one of them offered when she saw Reaper materialize. “We can find something further out if you think the Shrike might be lurking nearby.”

“The abandoned building will do nicely,” Reaper growled. “I want the Shrike to know what I’m doing to him.”

That got appreciative chuckles.

It was a quiet drive, aside from Reaper telling the two goons where to wait for him. The abandoned building looked like the sort of place the Shrike would use for a sniper’s nest, and possibly a temporary safehouse, so that was a bonus. The ground floor had been an office of some sort with a generous waiting area. Plenty of room to beat Morrison to hell and back. He directed the goons to lay the prisoner on the floor, take the shackles off, and leave.

Whatever they’d incapacitated Morrison with must have worn off on the way, because the instant their footsteps faded, the man stirred.

“Change of heart?” Morrison asked warily as he sat up.

Reaper kicked him solidly in one shoulder, knocking him down again. “Didn’t want an audience.”

Morrison rolled away, buying space to safely climb to his feet. “Except for Ana?”

“We both know I’m not going to kill you.” They circled warily, and Reaper swung one fist but the other man ducked out of the way. “But if she interferes in this, I just might.”

“Would you really?” Morrison asked.

It was a tone Reaper remembered. Warm. Compassionate. Supportive. He threw a punch, and when Morrison blocked, lashed out and landed a solid kick to the man’s groin. “Do you really want to find out?”

“Not particularly,” he groaned, doubled up and on his knees. “Does Talon know you’re deliberately letting me go?”

Another kick, this one to the ribs. “Of course. I gave orders to have you incapacitated and brought in so that I could beat you until you break.”

“You’re not going to break me.”

Reaper laughed darkly as Morrison climbed to his feet again. “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll find out together. Won’t that be fun?”

 “I don’t want to fight you.”

Morrison spread his hands in a gesture of reassurance. Reaper punched him in the stomach.

“Well, that makes one of us.”

Wincing, he tried again. “I know you’re angry about what I said-”

“Why would I be angry? That man is dead,” Reaper spat. “You said so yourself. This man just wants to make you suffer. It’s what you deserve.”

Morrison’s hands dropped to his sides and he sighed. “You’re right. Go on, Gabe-”

A sharp backhand interrupted him. “Gabriel Reyes is dead.”

“Fine,” he huffed. “Reaper, then. Go on, hurt me. I deserve it.”

“Yes…” Reaper drew the word out, making it a hiss of cold anticipation. “You do.”

No more talking; he punched and kicked, slammed Morrison against walls and into broken furniture, and didn’t stop until the man gestured for a time out. He watched as Morrison coughed, pulled his visor off, and spat up blood.

The scars weren’t entirely unexpected, but seeing how worn his face was…how old and tired he looked…

Most of him still wanted to beat Morrison until he’d experienced as much pain as he’d caused. But a part of him wanted to comfort his ex-husband, and he wasn’t sure he liked that part.

Morrison sat up slowly, wincing, and leaned against the remains of a desk. “Feel better?” he panted.

There was no anger in his expression. Only surrender and…apology?

“No,” Reaper said quietly.

Before Morrison could say anything else, he dissolved into smoke and wisped out of the building. It wasn’t hard to find the van, and he re-formed inside it.

“We’re done here,” he growled to the startled goons.

The ride back was utterly silent. The suite, when he returned to it, was still empty. Reaper closed himself in his room and tried to empty his mind, to shove away the tangle of conflicting emotions Morrison’s face had caused, but the memory of sad blue eyes kept intruding.

---

“He’s gone,” Jack said shortly, letting his eyes slip shut and concentrating on finding the best way to breathe with a minimum amount of stabbing pain.

A subjectively endless span of time later, soft footsteps approached and he cracked one eye open to see Ana kneeling beside him, one of his biotic field generators in her hands. Pain melted away in the warm yellow glow, and breathing ceased to be a torment.

“Back up to the nest,” Ana ordered gently as the glow flickered out. “I need to see how badly he injured you.”

Jack climbed to his feet and followed her to the stairs. It was a slow journey up four flights to the room they’d made secure and comfortable, and he stripped without complaint so she could assess his state.

“Nothing that won’t heal in a few days,” she said sourly as she finished her examination.

He shrugged his jacket back on. “I told you – he doesn’t want me dead. He just wants me to suffer.”

“So it seems.” Her eye narrowed, sending a thrill of fear down his spine. “But speaking of death, what did he mean by That man is dead; you said so yourself?”

He winced.

“Jack…”

“Remember when I told you I’d said things I didn’t mean?”

Her expression said she knew very well what he wasn’t saying, but she was going to make him say it anyway before she told him exactly what she thought.

“I…before I threw my wedding ring at him, I told him that the man I’d married was dead.”

Jack closed his eyes, seeing the warped and damaged bathtub, waiting for Ana to tell him how stupid that was, but she didn’t make a sound.

“I know,” he sighed. “I broke his heart badly enough that he tried to kill himself. I deserve everything he does to me. No matter what Angela says, it’s my fault he’s trapped in a body made of ash.”

“And you think just letting him beat on you is going to solve anything?” she asked sharply, starling him into opening his eyes. Ana glared at him, arms crossed. “If you want to fix things between you and Gabriel, just being his punching bag isn’t going to do it.” Her eye narrowed, making him squirm with guilt like a naughty child. “You do want to fix things, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he protested. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize they were true. Letting Gabriel beat on him was the punishment he deserved, but what he really wanted was to take that bone-white mask off…to cover the face beneath with gentle kisses while he murmured apologies until the man in his arms no longer hurt. “I still love him. I was an idiot and maybe I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but I want to make things right. He’s my husband.”

The memory of that charred bathroom came back, making his stomach turn. Because of him, Gabriel had no face to kiss. What if Angela couldn’t find a way to repair that damage? What if, because of him, his sweetheart was trapped in that hell forever?

“What if he doesn’t want things between us repaired, Ana?” he asked in sudden despair. “Until death do us part, and he…”

“Jesse McCree has not turned on him,” Ana said softly. “We must believe that enough of Gabriel remains for there to be hope. However, perhaps would be for the best if we avoided another confrontation like this until after Angela has discovered a way to return him to his own body.”

Jack sighed. “You’re right. I just hate feeling like there’s nothing I can do.”

“I know, old friend.” She laid one hand comfortingly on his shoulder. “I know.”

---

“You really think it’ll work?” Jesse asked quietly as he drove them back.

Sombra closed the screens she’d been working on. “It will work; I just have to tweak it. And I want to take it slow.”

“Slow?” He frowned at her. “Why?”

“He’s been like that for how long?” Sombra waited, but Jesse didn’t answer her. “Exactly. If he gets everything back at once, he’ll go into sensory overload. It needs to go slowly so that he has time to adjust. But he’s not going to want to go slow. If he knows I can give everything back all at once, it’s going to be like dangling raw steak in front of a starving wolf. We gotta keep this quiet. If he asks, we were extorting information from a medical professional.”

Jesse chuckled. “Or I just tell him it was a date.” The hacker didn’t respond, and he glanced over at her to find her looking pensively at him. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No…” She looked out the window. “I was just checking my memory. That was the first date I’ve been on where I didn’t have an ulterior motive.”

He reached over to take her hand, pulling it gently towards him and kissing her knuckles. “Well, it won’t be the last. How’s about you and me watch the sun set together? Maybe…Wednesday? If the weather’s good?”

Sombra reclaimed her hand, but not before squeezing his briefly. “Or maybe we could watch a movie. Something scary. And you could hold me through the scary parts.”

“Y’don’t strike me as a lady who scares easily,” he pointed out. “If you want to be held but you don’t want anyone saying anything, maybe we could watch a movie in your room and I’ll just hold you without you needin’ to find an excuse.”

“Any movie I want?”

“Any movie you want.”

“Wednesday night?”

“I’ll let Dad know as soon as we get back.”

Sombra smiled at him. “Jesse McCree, you got yourself a date.”

He whooped. “I ain’t never been on a second date before,” he said jokingly. “New experience for both of us.”

That made her laugh. “Okay, I’m turning the tracking systems back on now.”

They were quiet for the rest of the drive, and while they walked through the base to their suite.

“Looks like Dad’s gone to bed,” Jesse said quietly, taking in the empty common room. “Guess I should do the same.”

Sombra went on tiptoes to hug him. “Sleep well. I’ve got work to do.”

Blushing slightly, he hugged her back. “Good luck. I’ll see you in the morning.”

They both went to their respective rooms, but while the cowboy stripped and climbed into bed, the hacker flopped into an oversized purple beanbag chair and opened screens.

Now that she had a better sense of what the programming should look like, she could write a patch that would command Reaper’s swarm to rebuild one thing at a time. He wasn’t completely ash; he did have things that served as muscles and bones. It was closer to her artificial muscles than flesh and blood, but she could work with that. His brain, though. She knew that every so often, he needed to replenish certain things from a living victim. If she restored his organic brain-

But could she? Wouldn’t it need a supply of blood to give it oxygen?

Sombra opened another screen. Maybe having the swarm build an omnic brain would be best for the time being. That way, she could restore some sensory input and get him used to that…give his swarm a chance to adapt to breaking down and restoring complex structures before she worried about little things like blood and hormones.

As she coded, she pondered the irony of getting closer to restoring Papi Gabriel’s organic body by making his body less organic.

---

After a long night of struggling to forget Morrison’s dumb sad eyes and failing, Reaper stalked out of his room with annoyed wisps of black smoke trailing after him. McCree was making breakfast with Sombra sitting at the table, doing something on her screens. That by itself wasn’t unusual, with how the hacker had slipped into their little pseudo-family, but there was a cardboard box of what seemed to be omnic parts sitting at his place.

“Buenos dias, Papi,” Sombra chirped brightly as he stopped to glare. “Got a patch for your swarm. It’s a big one,” she warned. “Should restore your sight and your sense of smell, but you’ll need something more filling than pancakes and bacon, so…” She gestured at the box.

Sight.

Not that Reaper was blind, per se. The skull mask contained some very sophisticated optical equipment meant to provide a robust visual display that augmented the wearer’s sight. But he had no eyes to see the display, so the “extra” information was all he had. It was functional, but frustrating. Combined with a lack of tactile and olfactory input, it made him feel like he’d been living swaddled in cotton for the last few years while playing a really shitty VR game.

“Give it,” he growled.

Sombra stood and laid both hands on his chest. A tingle swept through his body, buzzing in his brain, and suddenly he needed-

His hands dissolved as the hacker backed up, streams of smoke reaching for the box, devouring its contents slowly as the dry ache in his face slowly faded into tingles, and then…

The world snapped into focus. Colors, shapes, textures he hadn’t seen since he’d woken up in a motel bathroom. He took a deep breath, ready to sigh, and was suddenly aware of coffee, and bacon and the sweet scent of pancakes cooking in the skillet and a slight musk that could only be his cowboy son and he thought he might cry except that his eyes had no eyelids or tear ducts.

“Dad!”

McCree was hugging him, guiding him to a chair, and then Sombra pushed a mug of coffee into his clawed gauntlet hands. He stared into it, admiring the dark liquid and the faint steam rising from it, inhaling the scent and just drifting in wonder that he could smell again. By the time the wonder faded, McCree was almost through eating his breakfast and Sombra was beaming at both of them.

“It worked,” he said gruffly. “Did you want to be adopted? I’m legally dead but I’m sure that doesn’t matter to you, and you deserve a reward for this.”

Sombra grinned at him. “Oh, this is only the beginning,” she warned jokingly. “I’m already working on a way to let you feel. Gonna be tricky, building artificial skin, but I figure you might want to be able to take that armor off and enjoy a hot shower, and synthskin is easier to program than real skin that needs blood and nerves. Not that I’m giving up on getting you your body back!” she assured him hastily. “But that’s going to take longer and I want to let you feel things before then.”

“That’s it,” Reaper growled in a mock threat, “you’re part of the family now. No arguments.”

“Oh no,” Jesse drawled unconvincingly. “Such horror.”

Sombra just hugged Reaper with a squeal of delight.