moonshadows

“Bye, Dad! We’re leaving for our date!”

“Have fun,” Reaper called back without looking up from his reports.

Jesse grinned. “Oh, we’re going to. See, there’s this art show, and then-”

Reaper held one hand up. “Stop. I don’t need to know. I don’t want to know. In fact, I explicitly forbid you from telling me what it is you two are going to do on this date of yours. Understood?”

“Loud ‘n clear,” Jesse said smugly. “Enjoy your alone time while we’re gone.”

Sombra laughed as Reaper gave them what was unmistakably a glare behind the mask, and they fled the suite. As usual, they didn’t talk until they were well away from the base and Sombra had disabled monitoring on the vehicle.

“You’re sure she’s gonna be there,” Jesse half-asked.

“Hotel security had them both check in last night. She left the room, but he didn’t.”

“Alright,” he conceded. “Just don’t want this to get awkward, either by being stood up or by having an extra guest. And you’re good for your art show?”

She nodded. “She’ll be there. You’re pretty calm about lying to Papi.”

Jesse snorted. “It ain’t a lie; it just ain’t the full truth, either. Where d’you think I learned it? We did a lot of sketchy stuff in Blackwatch, and listening to Dad rephrase things for mission reports was always my favorite part of any mission.” He grinned sideways at her. “I’m not ruining any childhood fantasies, am I?”

“No.” She flicked at his ear but deliberately missed. “I’m just not used to being around people as devious as I am.”

They laughed together, and the silence settled comfortably around them for a few minutes.

“Jesse?”

“Yes, darling?”

Sombra stretched her fingers out, seemingly engrossed by the sight. “You still want to be with me even if I can never go back?”

He reached out and took one of her hands in his. “I was ready to be with you when I thought there’d never be anything physical between us. If you still want to be with me as I grow into a wrinkly, sagging, bald old man, then I sure as hell want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

She squeezed his hand in wordless thanks.

“Of course,” he said lightly, “that don’t mean I’m not crossing my fingers for your meeting. I just want you to be able to taste Dad’s tequila-lime pulled chicken.”

Sombra chuckled. “Not gonna lie, that was a big part of my decision.” She shot him a smoldering glance. “The six-shooter you keep holstered in your pants is the other big part,” she said suggestively.

“You want to take this Bronco for a ride,” he teased, grinning, “you’re gonna have to wait for our other dates to end and our real date to start.”

“Some things are worth waiting for,” she purred.

Jesse’s cheeks turned slowly red.

The art gallery was showing a collection of works questioning the line between man and machine and suggesting that humans and omnics weren’t so different after all. It was the sort of show where a girl with cranial augmentations could conceivably rub shoulders with a doctor who’d pushed cybernetics further than anyone else in the name of saving a life.

Naturally, that’s where Sombra had arranged to meet with Angela Ziegler.

Sombra got there first, by design: the plan was for them to slowly and coincidentally converge in the back corner, but she actually wanted to take her time appreciating the pieces so she was there an hour early. Besides, that gave her time to subtly check out the security system and make sure she had a sample of quiet background sounds to loop in so that their conversation wouldn’t be recorded.

The hour melted away delightfully, and as she approached the back corner, Angela entered the gallery. While Sombra drifted naturally from piece to piece the same as she’d been doing, Angela zigzagged her way from the front room to the back as though only certain pieces had caught her attention, and they wound up staring at a painting of a heavily-augmented man whose cybernetics were still operational (the artist had spliced tiny LEDs into the canvas; it was very effective) but whose biological components had died and rotted away, leaving his half-metal cadaver to regard its skeletal hands with artificial eyes. The unsettling but sobering implication was that even though his organic body had died, his mind lived on in his augmentations.

Sombra disabled the audio in their corner and inserted the quiet loop.

“You wanted to talk,” Angela stated in an indirect question, hands behind her back, not looking anywhere but the painting. “This couldn’t have been done at my home?”

“Jesse is meeting Ana for lunch. Didn’t want to risk Jack stopping by.”

Angela straightened a little. “Good reason. What was it you wanted to talk about?”

“The possibility of me going back,” Sombra said quietly.

“Back…you want to become organic again.”

“Maybe. Some day. Jesse and I are more serious than I ever thought I’d be with anyone.”

The doctor thought about it for a minute. “You are coming to me because you would need to construct an organic body. I assume things have gone well with Gabriel?”

“He’s been organic for a week and a half. Everything functions normally. He even has appropriate gut flora.”

A small gasp. “You were able to program…?”

“Not me. The swarm needs raw materials to build what it’s been programmed to build, and apparently it just took the bacteria whole from his…donor.”

Angela shuddered.

“I’ve got the full set of his current programming and I saved my DNA sequence when I deleted myself,” Sombra said crisply. “My problem is that in order to do for myself what we did for him, I’d need to have a nanite swarm of my own and I don’t know how to get my body to host one without it just eating me.”

“Quite a puzzle indeed,” murmured Angela. “I will give the issue some thought and begin experimenting with unused prosthetics.”

“There’s something else,” Sombra said when it looked like the doctor would turn and leave. “He’s ready to leave. We’re trying to work something out, and if we’re successful, it will probably go down within the next two weeks.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Angela’s jaw clench.

“I will do my best to ensure I can help at a moment’s notice if I am needed,” she promised.

“Thank you,” Sombra said quietly.

The doctor moved on to admire a sculpture. Sombra ended the loop and took a handful of steps to the side so that she could contemplate the next painting. It was five minutes before Angela had zigzagged her way back out of the gallery, but another half hour before Sombra was done.

As she left, she wired fifty thousand siphoned from an anti-omnic hate group to the gallery’s donation page.

“Morricone,” Jesse told the hostess. “Party of two, but I’m waiting on my aunt.”

The hostess checked her list. “We have your reservation, and your table is ready whenever your aunt arrives,” she informed him cheerfully. “You can wait at the bar, if you’d like.”

“Nah. I want to make sure she knows I’m here.”

Jesse sauntered over to the waiting area and sat on a couch where he would be easily visible from the windows beside the door. As he suspected, she must have had the restaurant under surveillance, because less than a minute later an older woman in a blue hijab approached and he leaped up to hold the door for her. Her face was more weathered, her hair whiter and of course there was the eye patch, but it was definitely Ana Amari and his hug was tight and warm. They followed a waiter to a booth in the back, placed drink orders – water with lemon and hot tea – and pretended to peruse the menus until he was out of hearing range.

“You look damn good for a dead woman,” Jesse teased softly. “Sorry I missed you in Cairo.”

“I was not expecting to run into your father,” she replied carefully. “Or his husband.”

“How is he, by the way?”

Ana sighed. “Sleeping poorly and self-medicating with more hard liquor than I am happy about. After their last encounter, he confessed to me what he said to your father that resulted in his suicide attempt.”

Jesse’s eyebrows went up. “I’d like to hear that. I never asked Dad, but I know it had to have been…”

He broke off as the waiter returned with their drinks; they ordered after a hasty glance at the menus and waited for him to retreat again.

“He declared the man I married is dead and threw his ring at your father,” Ana said in clear disapproval.

“Shit. No wonder Dad reacted like that.”

“Jesse…” Ana took his hands in hers. “He is adamant that your father does not intend to kill him, but your father still beat him very badly. Please. How does he really feel?”

“The first time he showed up,” the cowboy started slowly, “Dad asked me to break him out once he’d worked him over. He gave orders that no one is to hurt him, just bring him in for Dad, and…Ana, we fixed Dad. He’s back to his old self, physically. But he won’t use his name because there’s too much emotional crap attached to it. I think…” Jesse took a deep breath and squeezed her hands reassuringly. “I think he wants to make up with his husband, but he was hurt really bad.”

“Luckily,” she said dryly, “His husband wants very much to make up with him. You said he’s back to his old self?”

Jesse reclaimed his hands and nodded. “Fit as a fiddle. We’re working on a way to get him out of there. Hopefully won’t take longer than two weeks.”

“We’ll stay in the area, then,” Ana said.

“I take it you’ve been avoiding running into Dad?”

She smiled wryly at him. “It seemed prudent.”

“Can’t deny that,” he chuckled. “So, uh, now that the family drama is taken care of…”

“We can catch up. How have you been, Jesse?”

Heat stole up his cheeks. “I met a girl. We’re…kinda serious. I think she’s the one.”

Ana fixed him with a stern look. “If you do not have a wedding to invite me to, I will be deeply disappointed.”

“Still working things out,” he protested. “It’s…complicated. But whatever we end up having, I want you there.”

“Good.” The stern look faded into a wicked grin. “I still haven’t forgiven your father for getting married in private, in Las Vegas, in an Overwatch-themed wedding chapel.”

Jesse drew himself up indignantly. “Well, we certainly won’t be doing that.”

Ana laughed.

A couple of hours after McCree and Sombra left, Reaper got an urgent message from Vialli. Ogundimu was breaking out tonight and wanted Reaper to be there to pick him up. Reaper assured Vialli that he would be respectful and discreet, scrawled a note for his son and effective daughter-in-law, and left for the hangar.

The flight there was simultaneously boring and tense in a familiar way: nothing to pass the time except thinking, and nothing to distract him from thinking about the mission. Dispatching the guards once he arrived was barely a break in the monotony. Waiting for Ogundimu to actually make his appearance added annoyance to the mix, and when the man finally approached, Reaper couldn’t resist a dry, “You’re late.”

“I was delayed,” Ogundimu said shortly as he stalked aboard. “Let’s get going.” Then, in what was clearly a test, “Tell me about the Russian mission.”

Reaper complied, subtly sneering at Vialli and hinting that he and Sombra were champing at the bit to follow someone with more vision. He kept his voice steady as he informed the bigger man that Talon’s prize trophy, the assassin they’d broken Amélie Lacroix into, had been the one to take out Mondatta and cause London to turn into a powder keg almost as volatile as the Uprising.

“That was a missed opportunity,” Ogundimu said darkly as they flew through the night. “But who would have thought Overwatch would get involved?”

See, Reaper thought at the memory of his ex-husband. See, I was right!

Not that it mattered much in the long run. And he didn’t want to think about Morrison right now. Or at all.

“Speaking of which,” he growled, “I retrieved part of the Overwatch database. I’ve already taken a few names off the list.” There; that sounded nice and ominous and not at all like him deliberately deleting entries before he’d handed it over.

Ogundimu gave him a quick, sharp look like a poisoned dart. “Morrison and Amari?” he asked, voice just a hair too controlled.

“No, not yet.” Reaper was pleased that his growl remained even despite the adrenaline spike those two names had caused. How had he known they were alive? It had to be Hakim, that worm. But then…if he knew…did he also know who he was speaking to?

“I hope you’re not feeling sentimental.” The words held a subtle edge.

He knew. Fuck. How had he figured it out? Had hakim’s bugs picked up Ana saying his name? Worry about it later; for now, play it cool. Like Klingon revenge: best served cold.

“No,” he said darkly.

Apparently he’d convinced Ogundimu – either that or he just didn’t rank high enough on the man’s priorities – because he changed the subject. He wanted to talk with Maximilien, to get the lay of the land and some new clothes, and he wanted Amélie and Sombra to accompany him.

Behind the mask, Reaper smiled. So far, this was going exactly as he and Sombra had anticipated, and when he assured Ogundimu that he and the hacker would be more than happy to assist him, his fervor was genuine. Between that and the edge in his voice when Overwatch was mentioned, apparently Ogundimu came to the conclusion that he’d chafed at Morrison’s peace-loving ways because he started outlining his plan to oust Vialli when the Talon heads met in Venice.

“Can I count on you?” he asked, staring into Reaper’s mask, his words as hard and heavy and relentless as his fist.

“I’ll be there even if it kills me,” Reaper promised.

Ogundimu’s smile was sharp and more than a little cruel. “Good.”