Chapter Text
The gunshot hit him in the arm.
It was loud. Shockingly loud, the automatic sonic dampeners in his mask clamping with a faint hiss of air, and vacuuming away the sounds of battle into a faint roar as soon as the decibels reached eardrum piercing strength.
The clasp also trapped his hot breath against his face, filters whirring in a familiar hum that was usually only white noise until all other sound was taken into the background.
The quick snapshot chain of events- sound, clamp, hiss, pain in arm, pain pain pain- all happened in the time it took him to cross from one cover to the next, the force of the shot staggering him into a drunken sprawl as he threw himself behind the greek statuary. Tatters of fabric littered the ground to his right, and he belatedly realized it was because his sleeve had been blown off.
Red speckled the ground, and it was hard for him to connect that with the pain in his arm.
“Jack!” Filly gave a snarling growl, a wet, rattling noise that rose over the gunfire, and rose in pitch to become a snap of teeth and a furious bark. “Jack, get off your ass!”
He looked at his arm, surveying the damage and although it hurt, he knew it was only going to hurt worse when the shock wore off. At the moment he was in a soundless bubble of calm, heart a very steady beat in his throat, and a warmer wet beat trickling off of his fingers and into the cracked marble and dry thatch grass.
Whatever the shot was, it had torn neat through his body armor, blowing the straps and kevlar off, and chewing through the meat underneath. It was a mess of blood at the moment, but Jack thought he might be able to see bone as he cleared the debris of his sleeve away, with a combat medical efficiency more similar to an oil change than actual care and concern. White peeked out like an anatomy lesson.
Filly was a large gray shape in the corner of his visor highlighted in gold, fur shaggy and thick and broken up by glinting metal and silvery scars that twisted across her haunches and chest. The marks of a fighter, a pit hound- A beast that took fangs across her neck and chest so they wouldn’t get at her face, and then pinned them with her terrible claws and jaws.
Often people. Or other daemons.
At the moment she was tangled with Codename Reaper; For the split second it took him to reload after shooting down her human, and turn his gun to the tangled black and gray shapes chewing each other to bloody ribbons, a sudden bright and cheerful crackle of laughter sounded out. Familiar and heartening.
He wisely dove for cover himself, as the bright blue pulse of Tracer’s automatic pistols piff piff piffed across the dusty courtyard where he’d been standing.
“Hold em off Filly.” Jack murmured into his comm as Reaper trapped himself momentarily in open ground, nothing but a stretch of bare marble one way, and the sheer cliff face leading to some warm bathwater sea that Jack couldn’t recall the name of.
Tracer’s bright blue flash crossed the rooftop of the building overlooking, darting back and forth as she tried to get a good angle, no doubt keeping mobile in case a certain shadow of Reapers was waiting with a glinting lens somewhere with a good view.
For the moment as Filly’s own line opened, the close and terrible sound of a feline squalling almost burst his eardrums anew.
Reaper’s daemon was a terrible, black thing, no gloss to the fur and no iridescent sheen of spots that most jaguars had in full sunlight. It was like a cutout of the night. Only the night had stars, and cloud banks with city lights glinting off of their pluming bottoms.
She was more like a cutout of the dark you found under the stairs. Or the dark below the surface of the ground, when you were buried alive; No light. Just two poisonous yellow eyes and a mouth full of meat red tongue and glinting white teeth.
Currently she was entwined with Filly’s silvery, scarred shape, her gunmetal grey prosthetic front leg drawing bright red lines across the matte black hide, and her barking just as loud as the snap of her teeth clacking shut like a bear trap.
The jaguar squalled like a dead thing might, haunting and thin and quivering through your watery joints more than through your ears. Jack idly thought of all the things he’d read about jaguar jaw pressure, and the claws that hooked as his slippery finger reached for one of his biotic emitters.
It dropped to the ground, and he started reloading with one useless arm as it did it’s work.
The pulse it emitted started to knit and grow the cells of his arm back together, a slow tickling itch like molten hot worms stitching through his skin. It did so using a blueprint of his cells uploaded by Dr. Ziegler’s nanotechnology into the emitter, along with that of his entire team, taking up the bulk of the thermos sized device. (How the damned thing didn’t grow cancer every time, instead of healthy cells, he didn’t know. But the thought did keep him from using it perhaps as often as he should, much to Mercy’s displeasure.)
He could feel Filly’s pain, somewhere where his heart rested in his chest; The clamp of teeth that tore through her thick ruff in search of arterial spray, and only got mouthfuls of silver for its trouble; The claws that kicked up at her belly and drew lines of white hot pain where her own kevlar vest didn’t cover entirely.
He could feel the distinct wrongness of something touching his soul, shrugged off with the same mercenary casualness that the military had trained into the two of them since he was old enough to drink. She kept the daemon busy, and Tracer let another flurry of bullets warn reaper from moving until Jack was up to moving.
She was smart- Although Tracer was the fastest thing on the battlefield, Jack had warned her against coming in close to Reaper. The man could phase almost as efficiently as she did, and those shotguns would blow through her minimal body armor like it was spun from sugar.
Like they’d blown through his.
Just as he managed to bend his arm successfully in an effort to keep from fumbling his rifle, the elbow and cartilage regrown from whatever monstrous jerry-rigged weapons with the blunt nose Reaper was packing-
The lights went out.
“Jack-” Came Filly’s panting, uncertain whine, punctuated by a snarl and an enraged scream of pain from the daemon pinned temporarily under her paws. “-he’s phasing, get out-”
They’d seen Reaper’s phasing on footage, and briefly when his team had touched down in the combat zone.
Tracer had pointed with a startled sound as a black hooded shape materialized in the yawning triangle of dark in the lee side of a fountain, the bright mediterranean sun no match for the cold clinging mist that seemed to wreathe whatever battlefield Reaper strode into.
The rest of the team had appeared as if summoned; that asshole Deadlock son of a bitch; the scientist with the blue glow and the salty expression; And a shot from a sniper rifle, which pinged off of Reinhardt’s shield. (His veterans battle sense was only one of the many reasons Jack had decided to take him. He balanced out Mercy and Tracer’s vulnerability, and Torjborn’s stationary specialty.)
The light field distorted in front of Tracer’s startled face with the bullet’s force, right between her eyes-
And then she’d been off, like a lightning bolt.
He couldn’t help comparing the fighting style to Reyes. No one could. Not after the rumors. Not after he himself had crawled back from the dead. The ambush, the team composition, the way he laughed as he’d started eating away at Reinhardt’s light shield with those goddamned monster guns, like something voracious.
Jack had driven him off with a pulse of helix rockets that splintered the ground beneath his feet and sent him darting off to the side, laughter cutting off in a satisfyingly abrupt way as Jack pounded after him, Filly at his side.
(Maybe he was just as much an ugly monster as this black, murdering thing.)
Jack felt a hand on his neck, as Filly fought and he tried to reload behind the statue; With a quick upward motion of his forearm at the first brush of fingers, he broke the grip. He grabbed onto the hood as he surged upwards, and rolled backwards, taking the stiff and unnatural weight of Reaper with him in an all out brawl move, knee in his chest and other hand casting his rifle back onto its strap so he can slam a fist into Reaper’s side.
He’d simply dissolved into mist and avoided Tracer’s covering fire. And now, all the photos of bodies desiccated and empty, of blood coagulated in veins like dry cement flashed through Jack’s head as he fought the hands clawing at his vest straps, and the knee trying to get him in the groin like a dirty street fighter.
(Another Reyes move.)
There’s the one terrifying moment that shoots ice through his veins where he’s on his back and Reaper’s on top of him, the talons of his gauntlet shockingly close to Jack’s face, with only the trembling and iron hard grip of his hands keeping them from piercing the soft skin uncovered by his visor-
'Reyes would have been able to press this hard, just like when we used to spar.’He thought blindly, as he finished his intermittent roll and kicked Reaper off with a powerful flex of his thighs, and what felt like a pulled ham string. It sent him smashing across the courtyard in a satisfying tangle of black and cold mist, either equipment or bone snapping on impact.
'He was the only one who could match up to me, really, horsing around in the gym until he’d pin me, and make me say the stupidest shit before he’d let me up-'
The bio emitter is still sending white hot tendrils of cell growth through him, fixing the muscle he tore, clearing his headache and popping his ears. Reaper’s hardly touched the ground before he’s disintegrating again; eddies of wind caused by their own blows of breath and fists, as much as the sea breeze, clouding him up and around like the thick patch of an oil fire.
It’s unnatural, up close. Like watching a stop-motion of a plant dying. Or insects taking apart a corpse.
And then it’s coming back around, and Jack can’t think of what to do, how to fight something that’s smoke. Put it in a balloon? Glass bottle? Blow it away?
But to his mingled relief and disbelief, the weight that drops down on him with snatching claws just like his daemon is the solid physical weight of Reaper in a body, not a gas. He can’t touch, when he’s made of air; And Jack can fight this, can fight him.
He’s too close for the pulse rifle; The two of them trade swift hard jabs, reinforced claws skidding off of kevlar, and the butt of Jack’s rifle thudding a heavy tattoo against Reaper’s head and neck, as the assassin attempts to get at his throat. All the while rolling closer to the edge of his biotic field, dust coating his hair and Tracer swearing distantly from her rooftop perch as she tries to get a clear shot.
They’re rolling across the ground like lovers, a forearm across Jack’s throat blocking his grunts of pain, and his own fist clocking a crack as long as a finger in whatever bone-white material Reaper masked himself with. Something in his knuckle snaps even behind the reinforced plating of his gloves; But all he feels is smug satisfaction as something in Reaper's chest gives under the blow and there's a wet noise to the breathing so close to his face that wasn't there before.
Suddenly Reaper jerked as if he’d been hit, head twitching unnaturally and a loud pained scream coming from his daemon. Jack doesn’t look, just takes the opportunity to smash against the mask once, twice, and kick himself free from claws and cold misty fabric.
Filly has the jaguar pinned by the throat, rumbling like a thunderstorm and drool dripping from between her jaws as the daemon writhed like a worm on a hook, squalling fit to burst and at an angle where it can get at nothing.
‘Atta girl.’
“Give it up, Reaper.” Jack panted, leveling his rifle. The cracked mask made Reaper look weak, a trickle of blood on his collar from some leaking orifice on his face, but even now Jack knew that he’d be an idiot to assume he was harmless just because his daemon was pinned.
They had video footage of him getting out of much worse.
There was a sound like air unzipping, and Tracer drew up next to Jack with the dainty sound of two steps in combat boots, light as her bird daemon and twice as clumsy on the landing.
The glow of their laser sights criss crossed, drawing a lazy path up Reaper’s prostrate body as one of his hands held onto his chest. Clutching as if it hurt him. Like it was his heart that Filly had pinned. “Your team’s being rounded up as we speak. Come quietly. Don’t make this ugly.”
Tracer, for once is silent, eyes flicking from rooftop to rooftop and foot shifting to a shooter’s point perfect stance.
Reaper put one claw on the ground, and for a moment Jack caught a glimpse of forearm; Scabbed a necrotic gray, pulsing where rivulets of skin had eroded away and cracked like a desert that hadn’t seen rain for a century. A dead, stony thing that still moved as it sat itself up, the black endless holes of it’s mask staring straight through the orange highlight of Jack’s visor.
He didn’t blink.
“This got ugly a long time ago, Overwatch.”
The voice matched the glimpse of skin, dry. Parched, rough, insubstantial. The faint hint of some accent striking a chord in Jack’s bones like metal remembering a lightning strike. His rifle didn’t waver, not the slightest shake in the fluorescent blue dot where it found the space between Reaper’s eye holes.
And then the mercenary blew away.
“Bloody hell.” Lena swore, her blue lighting up Jack’s right as she zipped- or unzipped- forward, running through the smoke like it was nothing. It ruffled her hair, and condensed against her goggle lenses.
Her pistols met nothing but air, as the fog swirled around her and then forward as if it was being hooked and dragged at a point.
A furious, forlorn howl went up as Filly tried to snap at air, the large cat going the same way as it’s master, twisting down between houses and into the pitch black that escaped the glare of the afternoon sun.
Jack knew when it was over. He hadn’t moved, the laser sight exactly where Reaper's head had been a moment before and his heart beating a furious helpless throb somewhere behind his eyes. He watched the shadows for as long as it took for Lena to zip to his side, still swearing softly.
“At rest soldier.” Jack snapped, as Lena’s outline quivered uncertainly blue, a screech sounding from above as her daemon circled in agitation. His shadow ran over the two of them where they stood, a swift arrow shape.
“We’re not following him away from our team.” Jack kept his weapon ready, jerking a head and leading Lena to where Filly was dripping blood and still howling in helpless frustration. “That’s how we end up in traps.”
“This is- I- He’s getting away.” Lena moaned in frustration, kicking the ground, and allowing Church to descend and land on her shoulder. He clacked his beak against her goggles companionably, the clips on his harness jingling cheerfully and winking like little stars.
“I could follow.” Church offered, his beak clacking and pupils as wide as ink spills, chest fluttering with the swift breaths he took during battle to keep up with his human. The plumage looked ruffled where it was normally downy and smooth. Jack wondered if birds sweated. “They can’t have gotten far. The rest of their team is retreating, and Reinhardt says-”
“I said no.”
The steel in his voice must have had the snap he was looking for, because Lena and Church didn’t argue, simply nodded, and zipped off to the other side of the courtyard, up a wall, and over to the other side of the market that had become their battlefield.
No doubt to check in with Winston.
Or see if that god damned bitch was part of the few they’d captured.
If they’d followed, Jack had no doubt that they would have met an even harder fight in the shadows. More hostiles. A god damned trap. He could think of five different ways to set off an IED to take out pursuers, when your bait could turn insubstantial as smoke.
“You’re always such a stickler for picking the battlefield.” Filly panted, as he crouched down by her side, running careful and gentle hands over the superficial wounds littering her shoulders and ribs, avoiding the more serious one leaking red into her ruff. He pulled out a biotic emitter, and set it down gently, his rifle bumping against his knees from its strap. The weight of all of his gear was almost stifling all of a sudden, and the frustration bubbled over in how hard he gripped her fur, how still his hands were without the slightest tremble as he drew a thumb up between her eyes, on the graceful slope of her forehead.
He clicked his visor up, inhaling a breath of fresh air, and lowered his head down to Filly's.
She licked at his jaw, and whined faintly. “Jack, was it him? Was it them?”
“He fought like him. About the same size,” The idea of that stiff cold thing with it’s dead skin and voice being Reyes- even now, after everything- made chills shudder through his skin. “And the voice.” He heaved a breath, almost as canine as Filly’s, and ignored the heat of the biotic field as it repaired Filly, and uselessly flowed across his own skin. (Two uses in one fight. Cancer for sure, Reyes would use to tease.)
“But Yaretzi-”
“I know.”
When Reyes had been alive, his daemon had been a crow.