STTA 10: Synthetic excitement

[moonshadows]

Over the next few weeks, Reaper channeled his impatient desire for skin into plotting and enacting the assassinations of close to two dozen of the people he remembered Morrison complaining about most. Some of them were still in their positions of ill-gotten power, doing things that reminded him of the corrupt government that had been in control when he was growing up. Others had retired to live comfortably on wealth that should have been spent serving the people. He alerted Sombra to each target before he moved on them, letting her get digital fingers on their money. The instant he performed a hit, she siphoned the estate dry.

He had no doubts that she put aside a certain percentage for her own use (or his, she insisted at least once) but the majority of it got shuffled around and put to use helping the people it had been stolen from. Schools or libraries whose budgets had been slashed got anonymous donations. Shelters and food pantries, medical centers and small businesses, she found a way to provide needed supplies or ease their financial burdens another way. Sometimes, she paid rent in advance for struggling families. Sometimes she bought debt wholesale and forgave it. Once, she loaded a small drone with stacks of small-denomination paper money and made it rain in a neighborhood struggling to not starve.

More than once, he announced to her and McCree that watching her redistribute the money was almost more satisfying than the kills themselves.

A slower, but still gratifying, side effect of his assassinations was the public backlash against corrupt politics and politicians. Talon wasn’t exactly thrilled with that aspect of his private excursions – or at least, some factions in Talon weren’t. Others used his actions as leverage to keep their pet politicians on their toes.

Soldier 76 and the Shrike were conspicuous in their silence. According to Sombra’s tracking, they were active, just not anywhere that Talon was. Reaper wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Denied and furious, if anyone asked – the coward was running away because he knew how badly Reaper would break him given the chance. But privately, he felt…relieved. The memory of blue eyes, apology and acceptance, haunted him when he managed to sleep, and he had been successfully sleeping more since Sombra had restored his sight.

It was a welcome distraction when she had a shipment of synthskin materials delivered and announced that she had finished his next patch.

“It wasn’t easy,” she warned him as he sat on the floor in front of the various packages. “I had to program your appearance on top of the tactile functionality. You won’t have pain or pleasure, but you’ll have pressure and temperature.”

“In other words,” he growled teasingly, “I still can’t masturbate.”

“I am not programming that,” she declared firmly. “It’s way too much work when I’m going to be restoring your body eventually anyway. Programming your body hair was annoying enough.”

“Am I going to have eyelids?”

Because, of course, he could turn his eyes off but it wasn’t exactly the same.

“And eyelashes, and eyebrows, and nose hair,” she confirmed, hands on her hips. “I got into your medical records and reproduced everything down past the level of the human eye’s ability to differentiate. Now, you got any more comments you want to make, or you want your skin back?”

“Things that sound extremely bizarre out of context for three hundred, Alex,” he muttered. “Yes, you little delinquent, I want my skin back.”

Sombra rubbed her hands together and laid them on the top of his hood. The tingle he’d felt before swept through his body, leaving hunger in its wake, and he dissolved into a cloud of smoke so that he could devour the materials more quickly. It was difficult to describe what it felt like to have his swarm take in a proportionally large amount of foreign matter. The closest he could come was heavy. He felt like a fat brass Buddha while still being a cloud of smoke, and solidifying was like his particles were braiding themselves together instead of just clumping.

When the process finally completed, he could feel his armor. Although the swarm still recognized it and would take it with him should he dissolve and re-form, it understood that the armor was not actually a part of his body.

He had a body.

He had a body.

Suddenly, he needed to get out of the armor that had defined his shape for the past few years, but before he could do more than just come to that realization, a bundle of fabric hit his mask and fell into his hands.

“Y’don’t have any clothes, Dad,” McCree said dryly. “So, there: sweatpants, socks, boxers, tee-shirt, and a hoodie. Have fun.”

Reaper climbed to his feet – he had feet – and clutched the bundle to his chest. “You’re the best son ever,” he growled. “Your bedtime is never. Sombra, if you would like his hand in marriage it’s yours. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

He didn’t wait for a response. The instant his door had closed behind him he dropped the clothes and started tearing at the armor, trying to find catches and buckles he’d never had to think about before. A thought flashed through his head, a montage of all the times his husband had helped him out of armor over the years, but he pushed it away and dissolved carefully into smoke, seeping out of the armor and re-forming in the center of the room completely naked.

He closed his eyes and, for a long minute, just felt. The stirring of air currents against his skin, in his hair. The slight chill. The carpet beneath his bare feet, all the places where his new skin touched itself. Then he opened his eyes and examined as much of his body as he could see. It was all there – every scar, every mole, his fingerprints, his pride and husband’s joy. Everything was exactly the way it should be, and he found himself curled into a ball on the floor with his eyes shut, shaking as his sense of self was forcibly restored.

Once that storm had passed, he stood carefully and found a mirror. The face that stared back at him was him. His eyes. His scars. His teeth and tongue and he didn’t want to think about how hard that must have been to program. He ran his fingers over the salt-and-pepper peach fuzz on his scalp, through the short, wiry hairs of his moustache and beard, lost in wonder that she’d actually taken the time to program the grey hairs speckled through it instead of just giving him a digital dye job.

Now he was disappointed that Soldier 76 and the Shrike had been avoiding Talon, because he wanted to show-

Trembling, he cut the thought short and turned to the shower. The cool tile beneath his feet, the cold shock of water that warmed quickly, all distracted him away from thinking about Morrison. Then the hot water really kicked in and he stood there, eyes closed, letting it wash over him and rinse every thought out of his head.

Eventually, he turned the water off and grabbed the towel that had been hanging in his bathroom for at least two years and put it to use at last, reveling in the feel as he rubbed it against his wet body. With it wrapped around his waist, he emerged to find the clothes he’d dropped earlier and put them on. Socks, thick and plush against his feet. Boxers, light and smooth. Sweatpants, soft and fuzzy. He tugged the shirt on quickly and pulled the hoodie over his head, glorying in the feel of the fabric against his skin, tugging the hood up over his head and the sleeves down over his hands.

Sombra may not have been able to program pain or pleasure into his new skin, but just having it was pleasure enough. He curled up in bed, hugged an armful of blanket to his chest, and drifted from sheer contentment into the best sleep he’d had in several years.

---

Sombra watched in silence with Jesse as Reaper vanished into his bedroom, and neither of them said anything until they heard the shower start.

“So…” Jesse wasn’t looking at her. “Did you want my hand in marriage? Unofficially, I guess, since you don’t legally exist.”

She made a soft, amused sound. “Once we take care of Talon, I’ll make myself an identity. Whether or not we have a fancy ceremony depends on if Papi wants to come back from the dead or not.”

The cowboy choked. “Wait – you really do want…?” He grinned as she lowered her eyes. “Aw, honeysuckle, don’t you worry. Once Dad works through the last of his hit list, he’ll turn on our unsuspecting hosts, so you think about rings and how you want me to propose when the time is right, and I’ll do my best to make all your fantasies come true.”

“All my fantasies?” she asked quietly, looking up at him.

He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them gently. “Every last one.”

Sombra went up on her tiptoes, but instead of kissing his cheek, she whispered in his ear. “Remember the small box I left in my room? It’s for you.”

“Oh, now you got me all curious,” he teased as he swung her into his arms. “Why don’t we mosey on over to your room and you can show me?”

She giggled as he carried her into her room and set her on the bed, and then with a smile of anticipatory glee she handed him the smaller cardboard box. He opened it carefully, eyebrows arching as he took in the tube-like shape and realistically sculpted lady parts that adorned one end.

“You got me a stroker,” he said, surprise making his words flat. “A really expensive stroker.”

“I got us a stroker,” she corrected, plucking it from his grasp and standing up to model it like a game show hostess showing off a prize. “Three speeds of vibration and five patterns of stroking action. Internal sensors detect heart rate and velocity and adjust settings according to how intensely you’re going at it.”

“But-”

The rest of the sentence dried up as Sombra hiked the skirt of her dress up, braced one foot against the bed, and slotted the stroker into a socket he hadn’t expected to exist.

“Give me a minute,” she murmured, fiddling with screens. “Linking its internal sensors to my systems.”

“To your-”

“So it feels good when something trips the sensors.” The grin she directed at him made his pants feel way too tight. “And when you climax…so will I.”

“You…” Jesse looked like he was struggling to string a coherent thought together.

“I had a lot of fantasies about you, Jesse McCree,” she announced, putting her hands on his shoulders as she straddled his lap. “And I have been wanting to do this for a very long time.”

She kissed him.

---

When Gabriel awoke, it took him a minute to realize why everything felt off. He was warm, he was comfortable, he could smell Jesse making something Italian – probably baked ziti – but he could hear feminine laughter that wasn’t Ana and his mouth tasted…

Ah, that was it. His mouth didn’t taste, that was Sombra, and he’d been self-identifying as Reaper for the last couple of years because until now, his body had been made of ash and nanites.

He climbed out of bed and stretched, feeling the same generic response from whatever his body had instead of muscles. He had skin, he looked like himself, but underneath he was still a construct that didn’t bleed and couldn’t die. He wasn’t just Reaper, but he wasn’t fully Gabriel either…and being Gabriel brought a whole pile of emotional baggage he didn’t want to deal with just yet. Suddenly alarmed, he checked his left hand – but the skin of his ring finger showed no sign it had ever worn a ring, and he wasn’t sure if he felt bereft or relieved. He wasn’t even sure what had happened to the rings after he’d lost consciousness in Angela’s bathtub. Swarm ate them, probably. He wasn’t sure if what he felt at that thought was relief or loss, either.

Resolutely, he sat down next to the pile of armor he’d wisped out of and fiddled with it until he’d figured out how it worked. Then, piece by piece, he put it back on. The man whose armor it had been hadn’t publicly identified as anything but ‘Reaper’ despite no doubt having an actual identity; he could do the same. He was Reaper, but Reaper was not the entirety of who he was. It was a cover identity, like Batman, if Bruce Wayne had been declared dead after a missile strike on Wayne Manor. Until he’d gotten revenge on everyone who’d ruined his life, he would remain Reaper and leave the rest to figure out when he got there.

He walked out of his room holding the mask in one hand. Two elated looks faded into wary confusion.

“Dad?” McCree asked.

“It’s perfect,” he said shortly, laying the mask at his place and joining Sombra at the table. “But I can’t be Gabriel Reyes just now. I’ll take the mask off for meals. I’ll take the armor off in my room. I just can’t…” He closed his eyes, clawed fingers clenching on the edge of the table. “There’s too much to deal with and no point in wasting time or energy on them if they can’t be resolved, so I’m still Dad and Papi but aside from that…”

Sombra hugged him. “I understand,” she murmured. “That’s why I’m Sombra. Maybe some day I’ll have another identity and I’ll figure out how to use your swarm to build myself an organic body, but for now…this is who and what I am.”

When Sombra released him, he opened his eyes to see Jesse sitting across from him with a big plate of baked ziti.

“You do what you need to do, Dad,” the cowboy said quietly. “I support you a hundred percent, you know that.”

He did, and it helped.

Sombra took McCree’s hand. “I know I just finished a huge upgrade, but I’m going to start on the big one. Full body. Actual DNA. I know how much it sucks being stuck with a halfway body. Catch is to fuel it…”

He snorted. “There’s always someone in cell R for when I get…hungry. I’m guessing this will just be less for the cleaning crew to deal with when I’m done.”

“I don’t know if that’s unsettling or reassuring,” she muttered. “But at least I don’t have to figure out how to get a live pig in here or something.”

“It’s good to have you back, Dad,” Jesse said quietly. “Even if it’s just your face. I can’t wait until you can help me eat all this baked ziti and actually be able to taste it.”

“Just wait,” he teased. “Once I can taste again, I’m making a huge batch of tequila-lime pulled chicken and we’re gonna eat tacos until we puke.”

Jesse whined. “My mouth’s watering just thinking about it. Sombra, darling…”

She pulled open a handful of screens. “I’m working on it, Jesse. I’m coding as fast as I can.”

Reaper laughed.