Archive of Our Own ^beta

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. 

Chapter Text

They have no name, but they have a function, and that will do. They are one of many with a patient temperament and an understanding of patterns; theirs to scout, theirs to gather information, theirs to infiltrate an intelligent species, farm their intelligence, find a way to bring rest of the hive to the feast. You could call them… a harvester.

They and one other break off from the collective, hibernating deep in a crumbling chunk of ice; they and a thousand other teams like them, bitter seeds flung into an uncaring universe. They know, and their destroyer counterpart knows, that there is very little chance they will ever reach a world; infinitely more likely to simply fall through space eternally, long after even their hibernation could keep them alive. If they do get captured by the gravity of some body, more likely to be a poisonous gas giant, an unforgiving star. If it is a planet, unlikely to be inhabited.  If it is inhabited, unlikely that the lifeforms will be compatible.

Their race is a patient race and they have succeeded before, they have survived this long, and the harvester and the destroyer feel a shared thrill, passed through chemical bonds, when they come awake in the ruins of their icy transport on solid ground.

They move out immediately to explore, tasting their new surroundings.  A atmosphere– oxygen, not enough to kill them immediately.  Lower-scale gravity.  Helium-rich dust, bombarded by the local star.

There is nothing alive here, and the thrill fades into cold pragmatism. The destroyer crawls back into the ice, makes itself a tight ball of biomass and begins the hibernation again, stubbornly hoping for – who knows what. The harvester decides that it will spread itself thin, when the time comes, let its decay be quick and efficient.

But they crawl across the space of the planetoid, looking for their own last hope.

At some point, their photoreceptors pick up a vivid glow. They burn precious energy refining their eyespots, extending their visible universe beyond touch/taste/vibration, and see overhead…

A world, dwarfing the horizon. A world with clouds and oceans, concepts passed down by racial memory but unwitnessed by any of the harvester’s generation.

This is a moon, the harvester realizes, and appreciate the cruelty of that. So close to a glowing world, striations across its landmasses that might only be mineral content but could be life, and they have somehow landed on its comparatively small moon.

It’s a very small hope, but they’ve already beaten the odds, so the harvester tucks itself up next to the destroyer and curls up tight, so that its core might survive a little longer, and re-enters hibernation.

——

They re-awaken in distress, in an atmosphere, taste the destroyer’s chemical screaming, and get their first impression of the local intelligent life– compatible mammals, intelligent enough to have sealed airlocks between the harvester and themselves. Only their spoor remains, recycled air carrying their chemical trace– the harvester reaches sluggishly for the barrier between them. The destroyer is pounding at its own containment.

They can appreciate the irony of being made the sample, of being the harvest, but not for long.  They are already so weak.  They lose consciousness.

——

They regain consciousness. They are in something small, unintelligent, but it has teeth and the harvester flings their new transport-body at the nearest source of light. Sonic vibrations shock them back to sleep.

——

They regain consciousness.  Their host body nibbles at something bitter. They feel… sluggish. So hard to think. Their host is injected. Sedative chemicals, suppressing their will… they sleep.

They dream.

There are only sense memories, stupefied and paralyzed, only impressions they cannot hold onto, but they dream–

They dream a wonderful dream. There is a new host, one of the large intelligent ones. They spread sluggishly through its cells and nestle into its brain. They were never a romantic; they never had delusions of perfect symbiosis, but they dream of a body that welcomes them, that fits them perfectly.

They dream, and catch snatches of language, of intelligence, and they gather them up even though it’s only a dream.  They form impressions of their new host species– humanity. Humans. Voraciously social, generally voracious pack bonders. Their host is part of a pack. Their host is subject to experimentation, too.

There is a conflict for dominance across the planet– these humans against manufactured machine life. Omnics. Unsuitable hosts.

They dream of fighting these machines, of surviving, of stitching their host back together to fight even more.

One by one he loses his pack bonds, but one remains. New bonds form, the taste of them unlike anything the harvester has ever experienced, the purity of them dazzling. They swim in this body, consciousness in fragments, but re-collecting as they and their host both grow in strength.

They dream of stretching out and healing inside their perfect, perfect host. They are too weak to wake up, but they hear his name as they sleep.

Their new home is named Gabriel Reyes.

——

By the time they finally do wake up, it’s too late. Addiction snuck in while they were in torpor.  They’re so entwined with the host that the idea of separation repulses them. Sharing him with the hive? Out of the question.

They weren’t a romantic, not like some they could name, back in the hive. They weren’t an optimist. And here they are, completely unprepared to be happy.

The medical-human (Moira O'Deorain, a mouth full of respect and an aftertaste of distrust) has been feeding them– a hamfisted blast of nutrients. She has no idea what she’s doing and the harvester resolves not to tell her.  She tries to calibrate it to keep the ‘reactivity’ low–she doesn’t know it, but she’s trying to keep them asleep, like the scientists before, but she forgets that she isn’t the only one feeding the harvester. Reyes feeds himself– toxins, sometimes, but other times the perfect blend of nutrients. His brain is rich with affection.

The harvester can put names to the taste of it. The harvester rode the nerves of the tongue as it snapped the name 'Jack’, crisp and satisfying. Softer in the mouth, comforting: 'Ana’. Sighing: 'Angie’. Cracking with exasperation and fondness: 'Dammit McCree!’ Soft and buzzing, a reluctant affection– 'Good Work Shimada’. Every name has a unique flavor, every name a different bond.

Gabriel Reyes lies to himself and says he doesn’t love his found-family, as if his species doesn’t thrive on creating structure from nothing. He loves and the love feeds both host and symbiote.

That’s how harvester wakes up, in love, in a fizzing bath of Gabriel Reyes’ sexual arousal. That’s how they speak to their host for the first time.

The shock of fear-arousal cuts through the moment of union, hammering the harvester back. It snaps them out of their sleepy reverie. Gabriel’s body welcomes them but his mind rejects them furiously.  They go silent, angry, recoil to the base of Gabriel’s skull and nurse their hurt.

They realize how stupid they’re being once Gabriel’s emotions calm, and their own along with them. Of course they aren’t welcome. Every host species resists, every host species hates them. They were hopped up on endorphins and they thought like an idiot that he could feel the perfection too. Of course he can’t.  He doesn’t know they don’t want to kill him anymore.  He doesn’t know what they’ve been doing for him. Gabriel’s smart, they can make him understand.

They wait until Gabriel is alone, calmer, to try again, and again they get hosed down with cold fear and flooded with ethanol-toxins to boot.

Well.

Fine then.

They don’t need his stupid mind. Just his body. And he has to sleep sometime. He has to sleep /often/.

They tell themselves they don’t care if he likes them.

And yet.

And yet when they do steal his body in the night, the first time, it’s because they’ve been tasting his stress and fury, his hate toward a person that for some reason his complicated social structure demands he cannot kill. Humans’ interpersonal politics play out on a grand and stupidly complicated scale. But Gabriel hates this person, this 'crime lord’ and wants to kill him, and restrains himself.

So the harvester takes his body and disguises it in their own mass, and slips completely unseen into the target’s hotel room. They wake him up with a hand over his mouth and their mass clogging his throat and they feel the vibrations as their target tries to scream.

Fear-inside is terrible, but externalized fear– the cocktail they taste when they unhinge their jaw and crack through the target’s skull– is something they could very much get used to.

They eat him, strip him for parts– he didn’t deserve this liver, did he, he didn’t deserve these lovely lungs– and then dispose of the corpse as they’ve seen Gabriel do. They left no prints, they have no prints, but they wipe down the hotel room anyway, just in case they shed a chemical signature that they can’t detect.   They slip back out, wishing they could wait until the security detail came in in the morning– the screams, the panic, would be so gratifying– but there’s no time for that.

They clean every trace of the blood off of Gabriel’s body before they sink back under his skin, but they leave the taste of blood in his mouth, so he’ll know they fixed it.

When he wakes up, rubbing his face, he stops– and there’s the fear again.

The harvester tastes its own bitter disappointment.  Idiot host, doesn’t know what’s good for him, has no idea what the harvester did for him. Maybe when he gets the intelligence–

No, then he gets the intelligence later in the day, finds out that his hated enemy has vanished, and instead of happiness his blood is drenched in panic-panic-panic and he staggers away to storage closet to hyperventilate–

There’s enough oxygen in your blood, stop that! the harvester snaps, and then recoils again because now Gabriel is weeping.

“No,” their host sobs, on his knees, hands over his ears. “No, no, no…”

Stupid, stupid, stupid human.

Stupid human that dries his tears and snaps at his friends when they try to comfort him later, pushes Jack away instead of pulling him in to replenish the store of needful neurochemicals, stupid human that can’t take a gift, fine.

They tell themselves they don’t care what he wants, and yet.

And yet they can taste their own sorrow.

And yet, in the night, they whisper.

I’m sorry. What did I do wrong?

The only response is panic; they curl into a ball of their own misery.

Stupid. Stupid. Gabriel has terrible taste. Gabriel is a garbage human whose opinions don’t matter.

Why doesn’t he like them.

——

Gabriel ignores them now, desperately, and that’s okay. He doesn’t know what’s good for him.  They do. They’ll take care of him. They’ll kill his enemies and protect his family and make him strong.  He doesn’t have to acknowledge their help.  If he could just shut up and be happy that would be enough.

They have no name, but the newspapers give them one.  It fits perfectly, one more unbelievable piece of luck among all the other improbable things that have worked out for them on this world.

Reaper, the newspapers name the mercenary picking off one well guarded target after another. Reaper, the assassin. Reaper, the killer in the night. 

Reaper.

They like that. That will do just fine.

Chapter Text

Jesse McCree is waiting outside his office door with a mocha, and Gabriel Reyes is going insane.

"What the fuck is this?"

"...mocha you asked for?" Jesse drawls, eyes immediately shadowing.  This isn't the first time, and Gabe sees the mutinous urge in his lieutenant's eyes, knows that if McCree were a lesser man he'd be wearing the coffee right now.

"When. Did I ask for it."

"Paged me for it. About half an hour ago."

He woke up from a nap fifteen minutes ago.

Two years ago, something in his head stretched out and said Awake.

Right now, it snaps: Chocolate.

No!

Jack or Chocolate. His fingers twitch in his pocket, and he turns the flinch of his hand towards his comm into an arm-thrust out, snatching the coffee from McCree.

"Dismissed."

"Sir," McCree says, in a tone that says both 'fuck you' and 'tell me what's wrong', but Gabe shuts the door on him and leans against the inside of it as if that would do any good on a goddamn sliding door.

He thought he'd shaken the voice. He thought he'd gotten himself under control.  He doesn't feel in control, anymore. Once, just once, he woke up with the taste of blood in his mouth and thought about killing himself. He ordered Moira to cut off the injections, and for a while it stopped--

And then they lost Ana and it started again, worse.

Now... he begs for help in his sleep and wakes up in piles of chocolate wrappers. Two weeks ago in Budapest he apparently had a two hour phonecall with Jack that he doesn't remember, but they'd been fighting when he left and when he came back Jack had been all soft forgiveness and embraces and Gabe had-- shoved him away and checked his call records and then scheduled an appointment with Moira ASAP.

She tells him he's healthy. That his ravenous hunger is the sign of an advanced metabolism. The sleep deprivation isn't actually that bad. That he's reacting 'well' to her therapy.

You are starving us and she is a fool.

Shut up! He takes a deep drink-- chocolate too sweet, cloying on his tongue, but immediately he's starving for more of it. He pops off the lid and pours it down his throat, licks the inside of the lid, licks the walls of the paper cup--

He looks down, and the cup is almost sparkling white, just a drift of something like smoke curled up inside it. Before he can react, it's gone, and bitterness is spreading across his tongue.

He can taste his own fear.

Do you not want to feel the fear? We can take it from you.

SHUT UP.

And it does.

For a while.

Everything goes to shit anyway, but that's all him. McCree leaves. Shimada leaves.

--

Six months later, Gabriel Reyes is in the Zurich headquarters, fury in his heart and mutiny on his tongue and he's screaming at Jack and he--

--stops--

midword, because there's an aftertaste in the air-

He tasted it once before, in Paris, and didn't know what it was until later until he had five minutes to think about it until he was sitting in Gerard's hospital room--

Bomb!

"Bomb," he croaks out, jerking away from Jack, scanning the room, where did it come from, where did--

"What?!"

"Jack, BOMB-"

And then the world shakes and all he can do is grab Jack and throw him toward the nearest doorway and then the world blooms again in fire and something inside his head is screaming.

Chapter Text

-riel? Gabriel? Please, Gabriel, please-

Gabriel Reyes had the worst nightmare last night. He was going crazy, and there was a bomb in Zurich HQ.

Gabriel please I don’t want to be alone please wake up please

Someone is holding him tightly on a soft surface and it doesn't hurt and maybe he can just go back to sleep-- he really, really needs to sleep, everyone says so...he’s starving but the exhaustion outweighs it. He’ll just-- he’ll just slip back under, that’s fine.

No!

There's a strange feeling, a strained-muscle tooth-ache pressure  in his back just above his hipbone and a shot of adrenaline surges through him. He jolts upright, eyes snapping open.

He's in a concrete room lit with a red emergency light and his nostrils are full of the stink of blood and charred meat and shit and dust and burnt fuses and dead insects and -

And he looks down and notices first that his clothes are in burnt down tatters

And then that the skin under them is completely unhurt

And then that he’s a few inches off the concrete, cradled in a mass of all-too-familiar black ooze that goes to vapor at the edges.

So he screams.

The ooze flattens out, he thinks of a cat flattening its ears, and then suddenly it drains away under him and drops him ass-first onto the concrete floor.

There’s nowhere for it to have drained to, but he’s seen it do this before. There was less of it then, in that creepy operation room, but he remembers how it just wicked into his skin.

“Where am I?”

Some kind of maintenance chamber. I think. I didn’t stop to read the signs, you were dying.

Oh god. “Oh god, the bomb.” His chest seizes. “ Jack. ” He lurches to his feet-- almost goes over onto his face. He feels like he’s sprinted a mile. He lurches for the door, grabbing the handle.

You won’t get out that way.

The door isn’t even locked. It opens into-

Ruins. The hallway’s in ruins. There’s maybe ten meters of clear space down the hall to his left, and then the roof’s caved in. A wall of rubble on his right. A crack straight through the floor, water oozing in slowly, they must be under the water table, of course they are, it’s like a water shelf here--

The smell of death and smoke is stronger out here.  

“Jack,” he whispers, and blackness writhes miserably just under his skin.

I looked for him as long as I could, but the fire was too hot. I looked but it stripped us down. Your lungs were giving out. I had to retreat to this place. The voice sounds miserable. I’m sorry.

Gabriel looks down at his arms, the blackness in his veins pulsing visible even in the emergency light.  “...you’re sorry.”

I couldn’t protect you.

It genuinely sounds guilty.

“You’re not a hallucination, are you.”

Nope.

“...are you that fungus shake they gave me in SEP?”

Fungus?!

“Black goop in a tube.” The memory comes up, close to the surface, and something that isn’t him leans in over his mental shoulder and watches the black liquid splat onto his chest.

Well that’s undignified.

“...so that was you.”

Yes. Hibernating, then. Your scientists weakened me badly. I was aware of nothing.

“Sorry?”

Don’t be. I would have killed you and worn your body like a suit. I didn’t know you then, the voice adds defensively

“How about now.”

No. Now I know you, my host. My perfect host. I would never harm you.

“Creepy.”

God, he’s -- having a conversation with a voice in his head and it’s making him sick. Everything’s making him sick.  He shuts the door, sits down against the wall, head in his hands.

There’s a tentative tap on his hand, and then liquid flows up and through his fingers, down his arms and over his shoulders, squeezing softly. He jerks his hands away, and the black liquid vanishes again.

“No, come back out,” he says, his voice more even than he feels.  “I want to see you. You need to tell me what you are and what-- happened.”

A sigh in his head, and then liquid spills out of his skin again. It’s like dunking his arms into the ocean but somehow in reverse; it should hurt, but it’s just sort of .. wet feeling.

The black mass keeps coming, expanding, growing into a slow-motion fountain that consumes his arms and joins in the middle.  It bows double over itself, and when it straightens again, Gabe is staring into the eyes of a mask-like face, bone white and eerily reminiscent of a skull. Deer skull, maybe, but there’s the flash of teeth hidden behind the muzzle that are jagged and predatory. It speaks to him, sound coming out of the ooze, reverberating in the hollow white face.

“I am Reaper.”

“I knew it.” He feels numb.  Gutted.  He knew it and didn’t want to face it, all of his lost time lining up too perfectly with all those assassinations. A parasite in him. A monster in his skin. A fungus.

“You knew fuck all,” it says, irritated. “And I am not a fungus .”

“You used me!”

“I killed a bunch of people you wanted dead. You’re welcome . ”

“They were-- do you know what that could have done to me? To Overwatch? If you’d been caught? Do you have any idea--”

“I have a pretty good idea, actually, because when you went off script and killed people you did get caught and we got to see exactly what happened. Didn’t we.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you!”

Offended.  His brain fungus is offended. By his bad manners.

“I am not a-- there’s no talking with you like this.”

“There’s no talking with me? ”

“After the first few times I tried to patch up your broken social bonds and you had a tantrum, I figured that out, yeah.”

“You--” Chocolate wrappers. Mocha. Calls to Jack, to Jesse, to Angie. Texts he didn’t remember sending. Betrayal and horror fight their way up his throat. “ You-”

“Hey, you stupid vertebrate, you literally need your social bonds to function. You stopped making the chemicals we both need when you isolated yourself, your brain was barren and you flooded your system with cortisol and compensated with caffeine and worse-- and let that woman jam whatever potion she’d come up with into you--”

“I stopped the injections!”

“She never stopped, you garbage mammal! She just waited until you passed out!”

“She what- ”

The voice goes silent, comes back quieter and less self-righteous.   “...she kept experimenting on you. Not just the shots that fed me, other things. I cleaned up some of them, but there were little machines, too. It made us stronger. Bonded us closer. Changed you.  Never anything that could have hurt you. I’d have eaten her lungs if she hurt you.”

It occurs to him to question this confession-- but he doesn’t.  It feels-- it feels like Reaper can’t lie to him. ...can he lie to Reaper?

“No.”

“Stop that.”

“Then use your damn words, how about that?”

“Why. There’s a word. Why would Moira do that to me?”

“I don’t know.  I should have told you.” Tendrils of goo swirl uneasily. “But I was pissed at you, and you never listened to me…”

No, he can imagine all too clearly how he’d have reacted if a voice only he could hear started feeding him paranoid horror stories.  He might actually have had himself committed, finally.

“Why didn’t you?” He can taste soft, careful curiosity through his skin, the fingertips buried in Reaper’s mass.  

“...thought. Thought if I didn’t admit I was crazy I could outrun it.”

“...that’s dumb, Gabriel.”

“Yeah.”

They lapse into silence, man and goo.  Gabriel -- tries not to think.

Oh god. The bomb. All of swiss HQ. Men and women he served with buried in the rubble, he can smell them.

Everything’s gone, except him and the creature pooling his in his hands.

“...what are you?”

“...do you want the long answer or the short one?”

“Both.”

“The short answer is that I am a Klyntar harvester.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the long answer.”

There’s -- the feeling of a sigh without the sound, and then suddenly he’s seeing something, like a particularly vivid daydream that he can’t stop and he’s not driving.

There are millions of them under a dark sky, in a barren cold place-- they writhe across the surface, all joining and unjoining, united in purpose:

Find life. Consume. Breed. Begin again.

Distantly-- third and fourth hand racial memory, degraded in too many passes around the species-wide game of telephone-- he knows that this has happened before, many many times. Sometimes the aliens find them; sometimes they find the aliens.  Always the same: the invasion, the fight, the feast, the spawning and then they are alone again, alone and in darkness.

Their numbers are dwindling, but not so low they cannot seed the universe and hope. They send teams away, hoping, into the void--

One harvester, one destroyer.  The harvester to infiltrate, to orchestrate-- to even evolve a species if they find one insufficiently advanced for space travel. Subtle and careful and patient, tending the host species like a crop and bringing their fellows home for the harvest.

Some species are more than advanced enough-- some species know them, seek them out. Dangerous. ..for them, there is he destroyer. Not subtle. Not careful. Not patient. Gleeful as it rips infrastructures apart, burns societies down until they are weak enough for the feeding.

This particular team found the moon, and then the lunar scientists found them.

And then the harvester, the Reaper, half-dead and comatose, found Gabriel, and--

And found something greater than its purpose.

“...you’re not going to do it. You’re AWOL.”

“Only AWOL if they actually expected me to come back,” Reaper says uneasily.   “No reason to believe I was not lost like a thousand others. Some other team will find some other planet.  Let them go by. I like it here.”

“On Earth?”

“On Earth. In you.”

He raises a disbelieving eyebrow.

“Shut up,” Reaper growls.   “...perfect symbiosis is a fairy tale. It’s stupid. Only halfwits believe in it. ...but here you are. You’re an idiot, but you’re a perfect idiot. I am more, with you.”

“Just another one more person who only wants me for my body?”

Reaper sloshes from side to side, a fidget.   “Well. It’d be lonely in here without you.”

He remembers the raw panic in his head when it was trying to wake him up, and believes it. ...in a grotesque way, it’s comforting; he’s lost everything, but this one unwelcome passenger is still here.

He’s lost everything.

Everything.

Twenty years of sweat and blood and midnight missions and shoestring alliances and paperwork until their eyes crossed, twenty years of soul crushing compromise and stupid bullshit games he could only stand because he knew they were leaving the world better than they found it knew they were the right people doing the worst job he knew-

He believed-

Can’t even imagine rebuilding the hole is too big and he can’t do it alone not without Ana not without Jack fuck everything fuck the world they gave it everything and it found a way to take more-

Talon was in them like a cancer he was going to shake Jack down until he understood but it was too late it was too late he didn’t know the rot was this deep he thought he knew and they took him by surprise they took everything-

This time he doesn’t recoil from the liquid that pools up his arms; he lets it surround his shoulders. The masklike face dissolves, reforms next to his face, hard forehead against his temple.

He's so goddamn low that the oilslick alien sharing his body is a comfort. It embraces him, and he shudders with exhaustion and bone-deep hunger.

I know. I know. We're tired , Reaper soothes inside his head.

"I'm starving."

We are starving, it-- they, he guesses, something this intelligent is at least they-- say uneasily. "We used so much energy. Ate what we could, but the bodies were so burnt. Not much nutrition left."

"You eat people." Another shudder. "You made me eat people."

Only your enemies. The dead. Didn't want to risk your panic. So empathetic, feel for everyone. Even the omnics when they shoot at you.

"They were treated like slaves. They've got a right to be angry."

He can feel Reaper's eyeroll, even with no actual eyes to roll. “Ridiculous pack-bonding species, empathy is the weirdest survival mechanism. Arbitrary."

"It's-"

He cuts off.  He doesn't have the energy to argue.

"...you doing something?"

“ Yes.  I can't get us back out. Used too much energy. But can hibernate us till rescue comes. Now that I know I can wake you up. ”

"I don't care."

“Shhh, that's the adrenal fatigue talking. You want to live. Feel better when we're out. When we feed.”

"Don't wanna eat people."

“Only your enemies. Only the juicy parts.”

"Woozy."

Yes. Slowing our metabolism now, heart rate, breathing. Lie down.

The blanket slips off his shoulders and drains into his skin, but the room feels warmer than it did. Or. No. That's a symptom of something, his body is colder so everything feels warmer...

"Don' leave." His tongue stumbles over itself, and he holds out his empty hands.

Oily fluid pools in them, forms an orange-sized blob in his cupped palms. It sprouts a little white mask.

Always with you, Gabriel. Never alone. Promise. The little blob nods firmly and pats at his thumbs before it slips back into him.

"We're gonna talk about this."

Later.

He slumps against the wall and closes his eyes.

-He opens his eyes with an effort; they're gummy and dry.

"Something go wrong? Thought you wanted a nap."

An answering pulse of anxiety that isn't his, sluggish and defensive.

The smell of burning building has faded; there's a strong stink of stagnant water.  The red emergency light is flickering dangerously.

His body feels not quite his own. He knows this feeling. Lost time. How long was he down? Why'd Reaper wake him?

Heard something, Reaper whispers, sounding exhausted. Rescue maybe. Sounds wrong. Smells wrong.

"I can't hear anything."

Quiet!

I can't hear anything, he thinks, feeling stupid.

Reaper groans and their senses slosh over into his, and he -- can taste and hear absolutely everything. His whole body's a receptor for vibration, his skin hypersensitive to the chemicals settling against it.

Methodical grinding and pushing. Rubble shifts; he can taste the dust and the newly disturbed ash. They're close, close enough to stir up the foul air, he can feel the pressure shift as they breach the rubble in the hall.

Through Reaper’s senses he can hear a familiar voice: “Heat signature here!”

His heart jumps into his throat. Moira!

Wait. Something wrong.

“O’Deorain!” He staggers to his feet, up to the door. Feels weak as a kitten-- worse than the SEP shots, worse than when he was laid up after that shot from a bastion unit.

“Gabriel?”

“Moira!” He fumbles the door handle, steps out into the hall with a splash. It’s flooded to his ankles; the floor is sinking into the muddy ground. But there’s Moira, light strapped to her shoulder, and his whole body floods with relief.

“Gabriel, thank god,” she says, rushing to his side. “We thought we’d lost you.”

“Take more than this… to kill me.”

“I knew you’d pull through.” She looks oddly proud. The emergency lights throw shadows at odd angles, make her expression look cruel.

“Got to mobilize.  Got to-- get any other survivors. Morrison-?”

“Ah, I’m afraid there’s no sign of him.”

He stops. The relief goes cold. Why does she sound almost satisfied?

“But they never needed him. They needed you. We need you, Gabriel. You’re better than the rest.” 

More figures pushing through the rubble, climbing into the hall. Takes a second to realize that it’s not the light making them so dark; it’s black uniforms. Black helmets. Heavy weaponry.

“Hostiles!” he barks, pushing Moira clumsily behind him.

Needle on your six!

Something stings in the back of his neck.

“What!” his head starts to spin, the tiny bit of composure he pulled together dissolving.

It’s a sedative it’s a sedative I’m going to eat her fucking face! Reaper shrieks in outrage.

“It’s all right, Gabriel,” Moira croons, catching him as he sways. “It’ll all make sense soon. It’s all right.  We’ll take care of you. Better than Overwatch ever did. Poor Gabriel. You rest now.”

Gabe’s already going numb.

Oh this, this, this is strong, Reaper says, sounding almost... frightened.

He’s a fucking idiot.

He came here to try to convince Jack that Talon was infiltrating Overwatch, and there was a mole in Blackwatch the whole time. So confident he’d kept his branch untouched and she was with… Talon… the whole

can’t metabolize this stupid garbage can't

Reaper?

Gabriel... sorry… the voice is as close as his own mind but it sounds so far away. Everything’s so far away.

Darkness again.

Chapter Text

As much as the Reaper has shaped Gabriel’s body, within and without, adjusting his hormone output to better match the blueprint of his mind and patching up the damage to his organs and healing his wounds, he shaped them, too.  He was their blueprint for language, imprinting on them when they were hibernating; his words became their words. His peoples’ phrasing and tics settled into the way they perceive human speech.

And his habitual profanity-as-stress response is very much their own as well, which is why it comes awake sluggishly after fitful undreams thinking that this is just like the fucking moon all fucking over again, goddammit.

They feel… odd. Ill. The nerves of Gabriel’s skin, his primitive sense of touch (the man can’t even taste chemicals without Reaper helping him along) are even duller than normal. His breathing feels impaired, and his heart is beating far too slowly. The pulses that nudge Reaper against the protective cage of bone come seconds apart. What is this blood-oxygen saturation? That can’t be right, Gabriel would be dead.

He feels dead, almost unresponsive. All they can hear from his brain is a series of chords, over and over again, and they start to panic. They reach through his body, looking for the blockage, the damage, but they feel stretched out and oddly numb, unable to react quickly.

They have the unwelcome feeling of not knowing what their own biomass is doing, and it takes a while to muster control to unfurl their core intelligence from the shelter between Gabriel’s ribs and heart, to tap into his auditory and optical nerves, and even when they do they think they must have done it wrong because--

Gabriel is sitting in a room with Moira O’Deorain and Roberto Vialli and he is not trying to murder either of them. He is just sitting. Humming, an auditory reinforcement of the repetitive musical phrase in his head.

AND.

AND.

AND!

He is extending his hand-- his skin is washed out, deoxygenated blue under bronze skin combining into something entirely too corpselike-- and he is using Reaper’s biomass, without their will, extending it out into a pool of smoke and liquid. They can feel it now. They are being puppeted.

AND.

Reaper’s thoughts stutter out, because their biomass subsides back into Gabriel’s body and there is less of it but Gabriel is holding a gleaming hunting knife.

Holy shit.

Reaper, Gabriel thinks, dully, the first verbalized thought since they reawakened and they almost melt with the relief. They wait for the rush of fear that always accompanies their voice in his mind.

The corresponding neurotransmitters come out in a relative dribble; there’s barely a waft of panic.

Gabriel?

You’re alive. I’m glad.

He is. Distantly, but identifiably, which is unexpected and leaves Reaper feeling tangled in itself.

Externally he gives no sign of the conversation. It may as well not even be happening.  He’s turning the hunting knife in his hands; he tosses it lightly, catches it by the handle. Hums.

Holy shit we should not be able to do that.

No? Is this not a thing you do?

No, that is some invasion leader bullshit. I’m just a harvester. We can’t just excrete new material. They reach through Gabriel’s skin, subtly tasting the handle of the blade, which is nothing more or less than the polished wood grain it appears to be.

They start pouring over themselves, examining every bit of themselves and the places they mesh with Gabriel. They are distantly aware that Vialli and O’Deorain are talking, a secondhand irritant through Gabriel's sense of hearing.

“Is he going to keep doing that, doctor?”

“It seems to be a symptom of the treatment. Ms. LaCroix was the same way, you remember. Old French love songs at all hours. ”

Not that Reaper cares about many humans, strictly, but they have come to share the feelings of rage and loss brought on by the memory of the LaCroixes, and the bare trickle of distant sadness that Gabriel’s brain squeezes out is … terrifying in its insufficiency.

He feels dead. He’s there, but he feels dead, his vibrant needs and thoughts and urges all dialed down to a volume so low Reaper can barely feel them. He should be enraged to know that someone he trusted was in on Amelie’s capture and Gerard’s death and he’s just… sort of mildly regretful about it.

This is awful.  

Oh, oh, they’ve found it, the change in them. They’d gotten so used to O’Deorain’s little machines that they hadn’t realized how many there are now, their mass and Gabriel’s cells packed to standing-room-only with nanotech. They’re stupid little nanites, but smart enough to print out complex cellular structures in a way that would be the envy of even the most experienced Klyntar general. And they are bound to Gabriel’s-- and Reaper’s-- wills.

Gabriel hums, summons their biomass out-- this time, with Reaper’s hesitant cooperation, it goes much faster-- and the knife dissolves into carbon and iron and is part of them again.

“Can you make him stop?” Vialli says, in an unbecoming whine.

“...I’ve achieved results I never dreamed of. The greatest tactician in a century unbound by needless emotion or petty arbitrary morality. He can make his own weapons. Move through almost any obstacle. Feed on the dead.” O’Deorain’s voice goes toxin-sweet. “You want me to risk all that so that he stops humming?”

Mutter of surrender.

Gabriel, why aren’t we killing them?

Gabriel hums, flexes his fingers, and wills them into a mass of smoke, little bits of himandReaper carried cell by cell out by the nanites. The feeling of being separated-but-connected to their own cells is disorienting, fascinating. The sight of Gabriel’s hand dissolving, solid flesh melting into nothing, is alarming.

A squirt of brain chemicals; Gabriel is vaguely interested and would be violently retching if his rejection response wasn’t being strangled before it could start.

“No other subject has responded to the treatments like this,” O’Deorain murmurs, and steps forward, tracing a proprietary finger down his arm. Even through the fabric of his ruined hoody, Reaper wants to crawl away from her, skin and all. Of course no other subject can do this, no other subject has a hyperadaptive symbiote bonded with them, and she should be grateful for it. Not that it's going to take more than one hyperadaptive symbiote to pop her head off like a grape from its stem. 

Gabriel! Let’s eat her!

Gabriel hums softly to himself, quells their urge to kill. 

Stupid song! Reaper chases the notes through his head, sifting through memories-- those are always fallible, but these are hypermalleable, from very very early in Gabriel’s development, when he was round and soft and even more vulnerable than humans usually are. ...adorable. These notes, they're some song from a movie--  something that came out a few years before he was born, and had once been so ubiquitous that his parents cringed every time they heard it.

Somehow this is his response to the trauma, the chemical blockers they can feel now sitting on all of his responses. Humans are bizarre.

Gabriel, they try urgently. Gabriel, O’Deorain is part of Talon.

Mm-hmm.

This is Talon, Gabriel. They invaded your nest. They killed your hivemates. Ana! Gerard! Your mate , Gabriel!

Matter-of-fact acknowledgement. He knows.  

Okay.  Okay. Okay, they can fix this, they can-- it’s going to take for goddamn ever and it’s going to be very very precarious work because they like Gabriel’s brain and don’t want to see it hurt, but they can fix this, they can unblock his feelings, and -

Don’t. It’s as urgent a thought as Gabriel seems to be capable of anymore.

Why not? they snap back.

If I feel it, I won’t be able to finish the mission.

WHAT mission?!

The looping, cloying music is back.

Do you want to have a harvest?

It’s such a non-sequitur that it takes them a second.

It doesn’t have to be a harvest.

Gabriel summons up a thought-- one that Reaper shared with him. A Klyntar race-memory from generations gone by; the ruin of a world overrun. His mind starts to tweak details; the murky images become clear. Instead of a hoard of symbiotes, just one. Instead of a world, the comparatively minor scope of a single terrorist organization. 

Do you want to have a harvest? And burn the bodies in a pyre?

Talon burns before them. Headless, mangled corpses carpet the ground. They feed and hunt-- theytogether. Reaper and Gabriel, one thing. O’Deorain is there, and theytogether make a razor sharp blade and cut her down before she can so much as scream.

Talon invaded Overwatch like a cancer. Destroyed everything. Betrayal came from the highest levels-- government handlers, trusted soldiers, friends. Liars. Theytogether will inflict vengeance tenfold, when it is least expected, when they have extended their own influence deep into the organization.   

Oh. Oh, Gabriel, I see.  He has a really, really beautiful mind for a human.

You’ll help?

Of course.

They push affection at him that he cannot return, sorrow that he cannot match.  Of course. Gabriel is, in his way, a human harvester. He knows better than to attack now, to take a little pound of flesh when if they are careful they can feast on the head of the serpent. Then the rest of the serpent. A whole serpent, just for them, if they're patient.   

Gabriel hums to himself, and they hum softly in harmony with him.

They accept him into their midst so easily. O’Deorain’s smug confidence in her control over him sends prickles of irritation through even Gabriel’s muted senses, and Reaper, uninhibited, hisses inside his head with utter loathing.

She leads them to spartan quarters in the depth of the building. They do not have access to much yet, but they will. Day by day, year by year they will be trusted deeper, and deeper into the delicious heart of Talon itself. 

“We’ll have a uniform for you soon.”

“No need,” Gabriel says, voice a broken rasp. He sends an image, questioning, and Reaper responds eagerly, flowing out around him.

This is how I disguised you when I used your body, they explain, a little guiltily. They’ve now had the experience of having their body used without their consent and they are not unaware of the cruel irony. It sucks kind of a lot.

Gabriel can’t even be repelled at the reminder, and that makes them feel somehow worse. He’s taught them such awful habits. Morality. What a useless burden to have to haul around. 

They twine around him, their biomass taking on the texture of smoking black leather; they drape over his head, settle a projection of their own face over his, giving him holes to see through even as they marry their chemoreceptive/infrared vision to his own.

He examines themtogether in the mirror, and sends back muted approval, a few suggestions; there's still something missing.

Theytogether stitch metal out of their mass, tip themselves in steel accents, cruel and sharp over their natural claws. Theytogether send the nanomachines hopping, synthesizing long chain polymers and alloys and sulfur compounds, deck themselves in shotgun shells, and feel the weight of Gabriel’s shotguns settle into their hands before hooking them in their belts.

“Very nice,” O’Deorain purrs. “The infamous Reaper. I’ve been wanting to see you without your restraints, Gabriel. You really are extraordinary.”

It’s an unwelcome reminder that they are not alone with themselves.

“It gets the job done,” they growl. “What’s the mission?”

“Tomorrow, testing. Tonight… rest. You’ve had quite a hard few days,” she says, which is fucking rich coming from the woman who helped drop a building on their head and jammed Gabriel full of sedatives.

Theytogether grunt at her and turn away-- from her and the mirror, although they want to keep looking. If they stare, she might suspect they don’t like what they see. They have to be trusted, behave as expected.

Gabriel sits on the bed and goes still, at least physically.

Mentally, he reaches out to Reaper, feeling as tired as he ever feels. Rest wouldn’t be such a terrible idea.

She said she gave me more control over you. Worried you wouldn’t wake up.

She doesn’t know what I am, Gabe. Reaper’s mass squeezes tightly around his shoulder and biceps in an embrace. She’s poking around in the dark and one of these days we’re going to bite her arm off, they offer, an attempt at comfort.

Lost everything. Didn’t want to lose any more. Not even you, Hexxus.

It takes a minute to place the reference, and then they give a weak pulse of amusement.

Step up from fungus. We’ll get there eventually.

Don’t let them actually take any memories. Don’t let me forget what I’m doing. Please.

A pulse of fear so urgent it actually overcomes the inhibitors.

Never.  Never never. They don’t know how. They don’t know what we are.

They twine through Gabriel’s body, nudge their presence into his senses, their senses. They will protect him. And they will feel his rage for him. Their thoughts slide into synchronicity with each other, and if they are two very small lost things holding each other very tightly in the depths of enemy territory, they are also one monster that will be the end of their enemies.

Theytogether wrap their arms around themselves, gripping their biceps with metal claws. Cold, but they are cold, now; their skin barely registers the chill.  We are Reaper.  And there will be a harvest.

Chapter Text

[A quick note for anyone subscribed to the fic-- I'm stopping this fic here and continuing with a series so I can get a little more episodic. Click over the 'do you want to have a harvest' series and subscribe for that good good venomwatch content]