Chapter Text
(An introduction)
It’s a day like any other in the SEP, which means it’s a day of bullshit and nausea and unknown things shoved into his body.
Gabe is fucking exhausted. They’ve been running them on treadmills for a few days, testing their response to the last round of shots, and the science wonks are making happy noises about how far above human baseline they are and it’s still not enough. Not enough to take on the swarms pouring out of the omniums, not enough to survive long enough. And he knows it, but he’s sick, his body’s never where he left it, and he’s so goddamn tired of being poked.
Two labcoats– new ones, that’s never good– come into the gym where Gabe is having a lift-and-bitch with Lawson and Morrison. All three of them clam up, Morrison’s pretty pink mouth snapping shut around a profane assessment of program management. Lawson sets down her absurdly large kettlebells, wipes stray hairs off her sweat-drenched brow, makes a show of re-tying her pony.
“We’re just here for 24. Candidates 76, 52, Carry on,” says one of the labcoats– young man, white, thin brown hair, mouthing the words like it’s something he saw on a TV show. He used to learn their names, but they cycle too much now. It’s not worth it. They never bother learning his name.
The three candidates share an unimpressed glance, just a flick of eyes meeting, brown -hazel - blue, wordlessly despairing together at the new desk jockeys that have given carte blanche to change their bodies from the inside out.
Gabe bends slowly, maintains eye contact, setting down the massive barbell, slowly, with so much control that the sound of the bar shifting inside the weight plates is louder than the sound of 300kg touching the floor.
“That’s my day shot. See you tonight, losers.”
Two sarcastic, perfect salutes. He can feel their worried gazes on him as he strides out of the gym. He doesn’t think about it. Sometimes candidates don’t come back. Rodriguez washed out last round. Stevens and McCullough went off for some kind of candidate trial and then a day later their numbers were scrubbed from their rooms. Nobody said anything.
“So, what did the wheel of injections land on today?” he asks, as he follows the new labcoats toward one of the procedure rooms– oh, god, one of the airlocked ones, where they had that round of aerosolized stuff that almost killed Wallace.
“You’re a special boy, Reyes,” the older labcoat says, unphased by his irreverence. "You’re the only surviving candidate who passed the cross-matching.“
Surviving. A chill goes through him. Not like he didn’t know, but it’s the first time anyone on the admin side’s acknowledged it out loud.
"Cross matching. You– that’s for organ donation. Right?”
“Something like that,” older labcoat says. He unlocks the door with a card– not a palm scan, these two must be visiting experts and not part of the program proper. Not part of the plan that was laid out. Not part of the consent forms he signed, he knows that for damn sure.
The government is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks now. And he and his fellow candidates? They’re the wall.
Young labcoat gestures to the procedure room. “In and on the bed.”
He glances down at his sweat-soaked gymwear. “No prep? No decontam?”
“Not necessary.”
Whatever that means.
His sense of outrage is exhausted. All the ethical lines were crossed a long time ago, whatever new fuckery they have for him today is just… it’s just how he lives now.
Sometimes he wonders if he’ll ever see the outside of this place.
He goes inside. Lays down on the bed. Younger labcoat follows him in, slaps a couple of ekg pads onto him and clips a blood-ox monitor onto him, but that’s all– he retreats, leaves Gabe alone. That’s not– usual. They’ve moved one of the remote surgery units in, but the only attachment on it right now is a dual-clamp arm holding a sealed capsule about the size of a coffee can.
They don’t know what to look for, he thinks.
They don’t think there’s anything to do if he crashes, he thinks.
They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and whatever they found there is in that hazmat canister hogvering over him.
He can feel the pressure change as they seal the room– he can feel so many things now. No windows, but they all know when it’s raining now. Wallace and Morrison and Hu can hear silent alarms and security systems now. The soft press of the sealed-in air is oppressive, bears down on his ear drums like deep water.
Older-labcoat’s voice crackles across the intercom:
“We’re introducing a liquid enhancement system to you. There’ll be some discomfort, but if things go well, you’ll be out of here in an hour.”
“What’s IN the liquid-”
The remote surgeon unit whirs to life and unceremoniously cracks the canister over his body, like the shittiest fried egg onto a pan, and black ooze splatters onto his gym clothes and over his arms and torso.
It’s viscous, rippling with the fall, and it takes a second for Gabe to realize that it’s moving slowly with more than just gravity. He thinks, horrified: slime molds crawling over concrete. He thinks of those creepy funguses that zombify ants. People use them as fitness boosters, don’t they? Is that what this is? He slaps at it, tries to scrape it off, and it clings to his fingers. He can feel panic rising.
“Don’t move, 24. That stuff’s worth more than you.”
He doesn’t ask if they’re joking. They’re not.
Here’s the rub: there’s a robot apocalypse happening outside. All of them know that. And they’ve all accepted that this is the price to pay for even the chance of stopping it: they let go of their autonomy, their dignity, their certainty. It’s fucking inhumane and it’s probably necessary.
The black slime inches over his gym-shirt, and when it moves on, the cotton is dry. It slides a little easier over his skin, and he can feel it replacing his cold sweat, displacing or … intaking it, he can feel it clinging, and then pressing, and then–
It’s suffocating, his skin feels like it’s suffocating, bloating, filling–
The ooze pools up eagerly, covers his neck, slides under his t-shirt, slides over his face, and his control breaks and he screams and it goes down his throat and into his skin–
Then it’s gone, and for a second he’s actually– he hates himself for this– he’s actually afraid he’s broken the government’s expensive zombie fungus ooze.
He breathes in– and it’s fine. It’s like nothing happened. It’s okay. The horrible feeling of drowning is gone.
“So what should I –”
And then his legs kick out without his consent and one of the monitors starts to scream– blood ox, has to be, because he’s suddenly breathless, struggling to inhale as his body goes stiff and jerks (myoclonic seizure, literally means muscular jerking-)
His head slams against the stainless steel biobed and he’s out.
He comes back up in a different room– different smell, different ekg machine beeping into his ears. It’s not sterile in here, it smells like a fucking locker room, and when he lifts his swimming head, looks around, he sees it’s because there’s more than half a dozen candidates holding down every patch of available floor. There’s a hand in his, suddenly gripping tight– Lawson. His bunkmate Wallace is asleep in a chair next to the bed, loud clatters as Chin and Morrison scramble to their feet, cards falling from their reaching hands. Johannsen bolts through the door, shouting out into the hallway, and more bodies poor into the little room. They swarm him, everyone laying hands on his arms, shoulders, chest, talking over each other worried-relieved-urgent.
“…what’s with the sleepover? I miss midnight TV?” The energy in the room is unpleasant, thick with fear and some kind of unfamiliar celebration.
“You didn’t come back,” Lawson said quietly. “They didn’t– they didn’t say anything.” She bites her bottom lip, snarling at herself for the moisture flooding her eyes.
“Like McCullough.” Morrison says, his voice cracking in the middle, part raw emotion, part chemicals that seem to be putting the farmboy through a second puberty. He’s got a deathgrip on Gabe’s bicep. “Like Stevens. Had to check every day your number was still on your bunk.”
“Then after five fucking days they just come in and say ‘he’s stable’ and we could see you-”
“Fuck. Fuck.”
“How the fuck are you, man?” Wallace asks, sleep-slurred, pushing his way through to grab some bed-side real estate.
“I’m– I’m fine.”
…he really is. He doesn’t feel like he’s been out for five days. He feels like he’s just woken up from a nap.
“Hey, I’m fine.”
“Of course you are, asshole,” Morrison laughs, eyes as shiny as Lawson’s and Wallace’s and Chin’s and he pushes himself up and lets all these angry queer soldiers hug him because they only have each other here and apparently he’s survived five more days amidst the bullshit.
He never sees the two labcoats again. They don’t tell him if the zombie slime failed or succeeded, they don’t tell him anything, and once he manages to forget it he doesn’t think about it again.
(An Acclimation)
He doesn’t think about it when a Bastion gets off a shot a second before he can disarm it, close range, and he sees bone and cauterized meat and a cartoon cross-section taken out of his left side. He’s too busy killing it and then passing out.
When he wakes up, and his skin is burned but whole, and his ribs ache but aren’t visible, don’t end where they were vaporized, he thinks– it must have been a hallucination. He and Morrison can heal, but not like that. It didn’t happen.
He doesn’t think about it when he steps into a building and inhales and tastes (explosion) and throws himself back out the door like an asshole.
He struggles to explain what alarmed him to his support crew, but they trust him now, they clear the building and send in a remote-control bomb unit instead. It circles the room twice before it finds the well-sealed package of explosives, the leaked chemicals barely detectable even to the tuned sensors.
(But he knows. He tasted it in the air. He knew it was an accellerant.)
He doesn’t tell them that. He doesn’t explain it; he doesn’t explain things. He’s a fucking war hero, he doesn’t have to explain. It’s nothing, Morrison can hear ultrasonic and he can taste accelerant in the parts-per-billion it’s just SEP bullshit.
(Soon the rumors go around that he’s psychic. He encourages that. Keeps people on their toes.)
They win the war, but the world’s still in danger, a house on bombed out foundations with opportunistic termites all through it. He and Morrison are the last survivors of the SEP, and they give themselves one day to mourn before they confront the new impossible mission the UN’s saddling them with.
They’ve saved each other’s lives more often than they can count. They’re closer than brothers. Closer than lovers. When he kisses Jack and Jack rumbles “Thank god, thought you never would” and drags him down on top of him, it’s an anticlimax, it’s just another piece of warforged machinery clicking into place.
They love each other and if it feels like that makes him stronger, makes him faster, makes him healthier, well who the fuck knows about hormones. Not him. He hasn’t had a t-shot in months. Their bright new Swiss doctor looks at his blood panel and informs him serious as a headache that his body chemistry his changed. He produces his own testosterone now in the right quantities for suddenly friendlier receptors.
“That’s impossible,” she says. “I know. I’ve tried everything.”
“SEP bullshit,” he says.
“…Was it worth it?” She touches the patch on her own arm.
“To stop the war. Not for this.”
There’s a lingering hate in his head, and something echoes it sometimes, just this instinctual fear when he thinks about the program, the procedure room.
But that’s just common sense.
They walk into the UN and Jack Morrison bats his lashes and convinces an entire security counsel that what they always meant to do was put him in charge of the new 'Overwatch’ project and oh as an afterthought there should be a spec-ops branch and Gabriel Reyes should run it.
The lack of argument as they bolt Jack over his head stings, boils resentment in his belly. Petras doesn’t even put up a token argument, despite Gabe’s war record, his seniority. They get everything they want, and it tastes a little like ashes. He wants something to wash it out and has no idea what, but there’s this odd– intrusive flash, like something from a dream, of the crunch of bone and a strange taste in his mouth that would satisfy.
“Of course they wanted me in charge,” Jack says that night, sitting around a kitchen table with Gabe and his brand new SIC, an old friend from the war. “They think I’ll listen to them.”
“They think you’ll look better on a poster,” Ana says, so that Gabe doesn’ thave to.
Jack nods grimly. He’s a realist. He squeezes Gabe’s hand, then lays his own on his chest.
“I’m nonthreatening BARBIE,” he chirps, and despite himself, Gabe snorts.
Ana gapes, because she wasn’t there for the SEP and doesn’t know about the angry farm-queer who lurks under that polish and that lantern jaw. It still occasionally surprises her when Jack has a personality. Gabe knows better, but he still loves it when Jack’s bitchy side sneaks back out.
“I have such features as BEING WHITE and PROBABLY DUMB. I’m from a FARM. Math is hard!”
Ana puts her face in her hands.
“Shut up,” Gabe snickers, propping his elbows on his knees, loving this shady idiot with his whole heart. His brain fills with a wash of home-together-safe that he can almost taste (he can taste accelerant) (he can smell fear) and the taste of ashes fades.
“You love it.”
“Fuck you.”
“You love me.”
“God, Bloomington, I really do.” He pulls Jack unprotesting into his lap and Ana rolls her eyes and quotes fraternization regs at them without conviction.
And for a while it’s good.
It’s hard, but they’re managing. It’s a complicated business, saving the world, they walk lines, they cross him, but they’re making a difference, they’re doing real good when the UN’s back is turned, they hold each other at night and make quiet promises that they won’t make the same mistakes as their predecessors, they won’t abuse their power like those who came before, they will do this RIGHT…
They make new mistakes.
They stop new crises.
They step too heavy.
They save the world even as it lashes back against them, over and over.
They take risks, spread the umbrella wide, looking for oddities and oddballs who don’t fit any of the profiles the UN wants them to consider. A little shithead from the newly reformed Deadlock gang; a terrified teenaged super-intelligent gorilla from the moon; a multiple amputee ninja; a woman displaced in time.
(An Awakening)
They hire a brilliant geneticist, a follower of the late Harold Winston’s work. She and Doctor Winston’s other … successor… get along poorly. But they don’t have to see much of one another. What biological research Winston-the-actual-fucking-gorilla gets up to, he does with Angela Ziegler and not Moira O'deorain.
Moira has an edge to her that Gabe responds to. Jack … doesn’t, but he takes Gabe’s word that she’s necessary. He takes Gabe’s word that a lot of things are necessary. They trust each other, they have to.
“It’s fascinating, what you are,” she says one day, his medical records spilled out across her desk. She clucks at the old-fashioned paper copies from the SEP– there’s no digital record of any of it, and the paper is more black-highlighted redactions than anything else.
“…you could be more, I think.”
“I’m done with people poking me,” he says.
And then Talon takes over an entire town in Italy without anyone noticing, and Blackwatch is moving fast but not fast enough, and he tastes accelerant again but this time the explosives are already primed and three Blackwatch soldiers die screaming, and this time he goes to her.
“Do you know what they did to me?”
“No idea. It’s fascinating,” she says, the faint lilt in her voice making it sound almost gleeful. “But I’ve been having a look at your latest blood draw, and there’s something to it. Something more to you. I want to start some… off the books research.”
“…it’ll be on my books,” he says.
She smiles, and if it doesn’t look reassuring, she’s not the only one in Overwatch who’s not an expert at social cues.
She tells him: There’s something in him. Something she can’t identify. Something alive.
“Don’t look so alarmed,” she says, arching a brow. “Humans are full of micro-organisms. Whole species of bacteria that live only in our guts. We’re walking colonies. You, you just have something a bit extra.”
And for the first time in decades, Gabriel thinks – black ooze.
Tasting his own emotions. The constant bitterness of stress that’s making the stress worse.
A hole, like a cartoon-cut out, in his side.
“…And.”
“And!” Her mismatched eyes light up. "It’s operating at maybe a tenth of its potential. It was weakened, nearly killed– like a vaccine– but this isn’t a pathogen, it’s beneficial. It can be stronger. You can be stronger.“
"This could go very wrong.”
“Come now, I wouldn’t just incubate this thing in you.”
He doesn’t say: the government didn’t hesitate to do exactly that.
“I’ve learned how to suppress and contain it, if there’s any untoward side effects.” She tuts away his concern, and it’s testament to how bizarre his life has been for how long that … he accepts that.
In retrospect, foolish. But he lets her start him on this cocktail of – fungus food, he mentally calls it.
And she’s right. God, she’s right. He’s stronger every day. He heals faster, his metabolism is more efficient, his reaction time halves and halves again.
He means to tell Jack, he really does.
But.
One night, one stolen half-hour in their shared quarters, Jack has Gabe’s knees over his shoulders and his tongue deep in Gabe’s ass. His poster-boy, his G.I. Barbie holding the world at bay with the sheer force of their shared bond and the skill of his tongue, and he loves, and he loves, and he loves–
And loving Jack has a taste, a sweet, satisfying taste that he can’t get enough of.
And something unfurls in his mind.
Awake it coos.
Tastes good.
And blackness ripples under his skin and he freezes and shoves Jack back, fetching up against the wall, staring down at his own chest, grabbing only at familiar skin and unchanged musculature. No sign of the alien presence. Not even the echo of a voice.
“What’s wrong?” Jack picks himself up from where Gabe threw him– not just onto the floor but almost against the far wall, he didn’t mean to.
Gabe opens his mouth to tell him everything. Everything. The two strange labcoats. The impossible healing. The taste of accelerant, the taste of emotions. Moira.
He doesn’t know how to say it. It sticks in his throat.
“It’s– nothing, I had a bad moment. S'fine.”
“Okay,” Jack says, eyes still worried but taking him at his word.
Jack takes his word that a lot of things are fine.
Gabe draws him back into his arms and kisses the worry off his face and pretends he can’t taste fear, fear, fear.