STTA 11: Back to life

[moonshadows]

Sombra could hear the smirk in Reaper’s growl as he announced that he was going out to cross the last name off his hit list. The instant the door closed, Jesse paused the movie they’d been watching and their closeness on the couch went from cuddling to conspiring.

“Letting Angela know Papi’s progress and our plan,” she said absently as her fingers flew over one screen.

“What about…”

“Sending her the files on Widowmaker, too.”

“Good.” Jesse glowered off to the side. “She didn’t deserve what Talon did to her. If we can find a way…”

“We still have to get us out,” she pointed out dryly.

Jesse grimaced. “Yeah. Any progress on that front? Dad’s going to start looking for something new to chew on now that he’s done with his list.”

“Still waiting on…” Sombra’s fingers slowed, then stopped as a red box started flashing on one screen. It opened, and the writhing, blinking omnic language spilled out. “Possibly,” she said grimly. “Message from Maximilien. Ogundimu’s planning his prison break.”

“Doomfist?”

“Uh-huh. He’s not going to like Vialli’s take on things. That will give us all kinds of opportunity as he moves against Vialli and tries to consolidate his power, but we’ll have to have our plans in place because our window will be tiny.”

“We should get Dad in on it. How long until the prison break?”

“Estimate is three weeks. And before you ask, if I don’t do anything else, I can get the full-body coding done in three days.”

“Giving Dad about two weeks to get used to being himself again and decide it’s time to burn Talon to the ground.”

“Except that you can’t just dismantle an organization like Talon without a lot of bloodshed.”

Jesse flopped back against the couch with an exasperated groan. “I know.”

“Unless someone takes the reins and reorganizes.”

“And Maximilien is going to do that?” he asked, trying not to sound skeptical.

Sombra grinned at him. “That’s been the plan. Before Talon caught me, I was helping him get digital fingers into everyone’s business. We just need an opportunity to clear the playing field and Talon will find itself being used for peace and prosperity. Turns out war is bad for casinos and selling expensive luxuries to rich people,” she added dryly, eliciting an amused snort from the cowboy.

“Well, I’m sure Dad’ll be willing to gun down the heads of Talon once they’re no longer useful in getting him revenge on other targets.”

“That’s what we’re hoping for,” Sombra said smugly. “There. All my correspondence is done. Time to get coding.”

Jesse leaned in to lay a gentle kiss on her cheek. “Anything I can do to help, darling, you just let me know.”

---

Reaper knew something was up when he returned from his last assassination to find Sombra coding madly, McCree loading the ingredients for pulled tequila-lime chicken into the fridge, and stacks of clothing piled on his desk.

“Sombra had a breakthrough,” McCree called as he closed the refrigerator door. “I wanna bake you a cake to celebrate you being able to eat again. What kind of cake d’you want?”

“A cellular peptide cake with mint frosting,” Reaper growled back immediately, gathering up the clothes.

“So…white cake with pudding mixed in to make it really moist, then?”

Reaper looked up as it sank in that his outdated and obscure pop culture reference hadn’t fazed the cowboy.

“You pulled that one on me six times,” McCree pointed out dryly. “I could do a mint chocolate chip thing; you liked that the last time I made it.”

He had, but he wanted to be difficult. “Cherry chocolate chip.”

McCree gave him a shit-eating grin. “With mint frosting?”

“Only if you make it look like Troi’s torso.”

“Riker’s torso with cherry and dark chocolate. Got it.”

Reaper chuckled. “I can’t argue with that.”

As he picked up a stack of shirts, something rolled out from between them. Something with a tube-like shape and a sculpted Caucasian asshole on one end. He looked up.

“Don’t even try to pretend you’re not gonna make sure everything works,” McCree said blandly. “You’ll thank us later. Sombra’s got one and it is…” He trailed off, letting out a low whistle and shaking his head in awe.

Reaper tucked it back into the shirts. “Is that why I keep hearing yee-haw from Sombra’s room at night?”

McCree shrugged. “It’s better than my room, right? I mean…we got thin walls here.”

“Indeed. Thank you for keeping to her room while I’m theoretically sleeping.”

He carried his armload of clothes into his room and pretended he didn’t see the grin on his son’s face.

The next two days passed in tense silence. Sombra spent all her time in a chair, coding. Reaper tried to concentrate on his intelligence reports, but not having assassinations to plan nagged at him, and he found himself remembering how his Talon contacts swore up and down that they didn’t know anything about the attacks on Overwatch – and Blackwatch – despite Gérard’s being certain Talon was behind them.

Well, it wasn’t like he didn’t have access to Talon’s intelligence and mission reports. He started digging and discovered, to his deep annoyance, that his contacts had been telling the truth. They hadn’t known about the attacks. More annoying, however, was the reason for that. They had been deliberately kept in the dark because of their contact with him. Talon had been behind the attacks, and more than that, they had been playing him. The same bone-deep fury he’d felt in Venice, watching Antonio smirk at him, rose up to make his blood boil.

Okay. It was time to burn Talon down. Just as soon as-

“Done!” Sombra closed her screens and stretched her fingers. “Jesse, start that cake!”

From the kitchen, McCree called back, “It’s already cooling, honeysuckle.”

Sombra and Reaper looked at each other and exchanged a sheepish shrug that they’d both been so engrossed in their respective screens that neither of them had smelled the cake baking.

“Let’s get this party started,” Reaper growled, moving out from behind the desk to meet Sombra in the center of the room.

“You got a victim lined up?” she asked as she rubbed her hands together, something small and silver flashing between her fingers.

He hmphed. “There’s three waiting.” Arranging suitably expendable prisoners to be held in cells R, S, and T had taken all of half an hour.

“Okay. Here goes…”

Her palms tingled against his chest as whatever she’d been holding dissolved into silver mist. The sensation swept through his body in a heartbeat and he was turning to smoke before he could even take a breath, hunger making it hard to think, flowing through the air vents and coalescing briefly in front of the guard. Not completely, just enough to snarl out, “Call no one until I return.”

The guard went pale and swallowed, but Reaper didn’t wait for verbal confirmation. He flashed down the hall and into cell R, the cloud of his substance surrounding the prisoner so quickly that she didn’t have time to gasp before he was tearing her apart, ripping out molecules and strands of protein and weaving them back together with a hundred thousand tiny arms while the unused bits, the worthless cells and particles and cell clusters, fell to the floor like a gentle but exceedingly macabre dusting of snow.

Not enough. It wasn’t enough.

He’d made sure that the resident of cell S was a hefty man. Hired muscle caught breaking into the wrong building, easily three hundred pounds of bald, tattooed, pugnacious attitude problem and hopefully more than enough raw material to rebuild his body with. The thug was already shouting for someone to let him out when Reaper seeped under the door of cell S to swirl around his ankles like the manifestation of doom. The screaming stopped shortly afterwards, but the harvesting continued for what felt like forever.

Reaper stood up, finally, one gauntleted hand against the door for enough balance that he didn’t fall over before managing to lean against the wall. He felt…unwell, although he knew it was just sensory overload. Dizziness, pounding pulse, a churning stomach and a cold sweat all wrapped up in muscles that trembled from head to toe, and he ached in what felt like every cell of his body. He panted, realized he was hyperventilating, and focused on taking deep, slow breaths. That calmed his heart rate and eased the dizziness; the trembling took another minute. He counted his breaths, and when he reached a hundred he felt…better. Hungry, starving almost to the point of nausea, but his body was no longer scrambling to sort out all the processes and sensations that had been subconscious or automatic.

His body had to calibrate itself, he thought as he stepped out of the cell and began the walk back to the security station, feeling muscles shift and bunch under his skin. Made sense. Everything was literally brand new and had to find its balance for the first time.

“Call the cleaning crew for cells R and S,” he rasped at the guard as he passed, but his voice sounded…

Alarm thrilled along his nerves and he dissolved into the air vents before the guard could react because shit, his voice sounded…wrong. Different. Like it was rusty from disuse, but like his actual voice instead of the forced growl he’d been reduced to. The possibility of being identified by that was distressing enough that he was pouring out into the common area and coalescing before it occurred to him to wonder if he could still do the smoke thing anymore, but apparently he could. Good to know. Of course, the same corner of his brain that had so objectively contemplated his body’s calibration was now calmly pointing out that eating was something his new body never done either, and it was liable to freak out just a little.

“Water,” he demanded as soon as he was solid.

McCree was holding out a glass within moments of him getting the mask off, and he forced himself to sip it slowly. It tasted bizarre for the first half a dozen sips, taste buds going wild over having something to do for the first time. His stomach couldn’t make up its mind whether it was going to churn harder, or subside. He stopped at about half the glass and handed it back.

“I need to change into actual clothes,” he said, turning away from them and avoiding the questions they looked like they were going to explode from not asking.

He’d thought the synthskin was amazingly sensitive. Sliding clothes onto actual skin proved that he’d just been suffering from sensory deprivation for long enough that any sensation had felt amazing. It was with a conscious effort that he kept his hands carefully away from his groin because while McCree was correct in that he did intend to make sure everything worked, he did not want to know what orgasm felt like to a brain that had never experienced pleasure before.

When he finally emerged in sweatpants and a generic black tee, McCree offered him a wooden spoon that had been mostly scraped clean of dark chocolate frosting. He took it, but made sure to sit at the table before licking. Sure enough, his mouth went crazy and he just sat there, swallowing mouthfuls of saliva and breathing slowly, until the sensations had faded.

“Still calibrating,” he said, making Sombra lean back in relief and understanding. “Every new sensation is very intense because it’s the first time my body has experienced it. But I’m starving, so give me a piece of plain bread and my water and in twenty minutes we can have cake.”

Sombra leaned forward as McCree took the spoon back with a chuckle. “Do you even have gut flora?” she asked curiously.

He shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Maybe the nanites digest for me. We’ll find out.”

Plain bread and water had never tasted so good, and twenty minutes hadn’t passed so slowly since the Omnic Crisis. But the cake was worth waiting for, as was the milk he washed it down with, and McCree promised to make him a sandwich for dinner. He hugged both of them and retreated to his room to let his new body experience sleep for the first time, hoping that it wouldn’t be filled with either nightmares or indigestion.

It wasn’t.

---

The next two days were intermittently intense as he re-experienced countless things for the first time. Neither his cowboy son nor their omnic hacker addressed him as anything but Dad or Papi, leaving him comfortable in his own skin but suspended between two identities that no longer really fit him. He was firmly Gabriel again, but he couldn’t completely be Gabriel until he’d done something about Talon. At the same time, wearing Reaper’s armor an mask only drove home that he could no longer self-identify as the mercenary; it was even more of a self-assigned role than it had been once he’d gotten skin, and it chafed at him.

The first time he made sure everything worked, he did it manually and floated in afterglow for about ten minutes. The tissue was still distinctly used when he scraped his brain together enough to throw it out, which was a relief. Good to know his swarm understood the concept of substances that were supposed to leave his body and he wasn’t at risk of ruining the plumbing every time he used the toilet. He frowned at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, feeling certain that his hair was longer, because hadn’t it been peach fuzz when Sombra coded it?  Hair didn’t grow that fast, but here it was an inch long, He must have mis-remembered.

Needing to eat was remarkably easy to adjust to – he was already accustomed to McCree making sure he had food, so now he ate it and enjoyed every bite instead of just assimilating it. Remembering that he needed to sleep was much harder, and he suspected that Sombra pointedly dragging McCree into her room at ten on the dot each night was her way of telling him to go to bed. Surprisingly, however, the biggest adjustment was his voice. Re-learning how to growl wasn’t easy. He spent an hour or two on it and went off to his meeting with Vialli fighting terror – but Vialli didn’t seem to notice. That bought him a week to try to get better at it.

He made pulled tequila-lime chicken and feasted on soft tacos with his cowboy son. He reveled in pancakes with bacon and real maple syrup. He rediscovered coffee and ate cake, gorged on pizza and subs and hot wings, burgers and fries and soda. And he confirmed that his hair was growing unnaturally fast, probably due to the newborn hair follicles not knowing what normal was. It was already long enough to start curling, and he was tempted to shave it off, but Sombra and his cowboy son convinced him to leave it. In a way, it was a symbol of the new, uncharted future they were working towards, and he grumbled a few times to keep up the illusion but suspected that neither of them were fooled.

After about a week, he remembered the surprise McCree had left in his pile of shirts and tried it out. The way it clenched around him, reacting to his motions, brought back vivid memories of the last time he’d been intimate with his husband. Although it made the experience that much more amazing, he went to bed missing Jack so much that it hurt. Not the tired, scarred man with sad blue eyes, but his Sunshine – the man who made him feel full of light just by smiling at him, the man who always wound up wrapped around him sometime between falling asleep and waking up, the man who’d put a ring on his finger with an inscription of All my love and to whom he’d promised Forever yours in return.

The next morning, he emerged from his bedroom clad in Reaper’s armor rather than the casual clothes he’d been indulging in, irritated by the way he could feel his hair against the hood and embracing it as an emotional crutch to keep him focused on things other than the hedonism he’d been wallowing in.

“I’ve been distracted,” he growled, “but Talon needs to go down and I can’t afford to be anything but Reaper until then.”

McCree looked unhappy, but Sombra nodded. “I may have a plan,” she declared crisply. “It all hinges on Akande Ogundimu.”

“Who was securely locked up in prison, last I checked,” Reaper said, arms crossed.

“True, but if he breaks out…”

He did some rapid mental calculations. Ogundimu’s aspirations and philosophies clashed amazingly with Vialli’s. There would be some fairly intense power struggles almost immediately. It could provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but they’d have to be ready for it.

“Keep me informed,” he instructed. “I’ll suggest to Vialli that he might want to loan his best weapons to Ogundimu for information-gathering purposes. I have no qualms about being a double agent there, and I assume you don’t, either.”

Sombra grinned at him. “No objections here…Boss.”

Reaper rubbed his clawed hands together. “Good.”