A/N: ok SO readers from Son, You've Got a Way to Fall will recognize this as the eight chapter I just updated so don't worry yourself none there
I was prompted to post this interlude chapter from my other fic as a one-shot, so here you go!
Gabriel liked to think himself a patient man.
Not because it was in his nature, per say, but it was a trait that had been born out of necessity. Growing up as he had left little chance to act too rashly, and the second he'd decided to sign on for the war effort, it had become even more essential. It was just another box to check off on one of the ten million forms they'd had him fill out before entering the Soldier Enhancement Program.
It had been tested pretty much daily from that moment on.
They'd made it a point to kick the living hell out of all of the applicants (the term was always used loosely, everyone there knew they'd been personally chosen long before they'd so much as heard of the program) before they would even consider checking their specifications for the final bracket of soldiers who would be inducted into the program. The bootcamp had been two months of intensive work, grueling hours coupled with impossible exercises and a never-ending string of tests, one after the other until you no longer knew nor cared if you were being observed. Most of the tests were essentially useless, outdated in their structure and frustratingly pointless. But it wasn't the tasks themselves that mattered.
It was how you handled them.
It had started with endurance training, groups of both young and old soldiers chosen to be tossed together out in the wilderness with a couple of rations and instructions to survive and little else.
He'd seen Jack around before, but he hadn't truly met him until this particular phase.
The younger man's frankly naive trust in his own strength would never have been enough for him to pass the SEP's requirements if he hadn't exhibited that one key thing the fat cats wanted in all their future investments.
Patience.
They'd both been soldiers for far too long by the time the SEP trained its eye on them. In Gabriel's case, of course, he hadn't been quite as bright eyed nor bushy tailed as his counterpart. The few extra years he had on Jack showed in their skillsets and general attitude towards the program as a whole, and though they were equally ambitious, Gabriel was more of the type to hold his cards close to his chest. He had few comrades he'd willingly call a friend at gunpoint, and he was content to keep it that way. He'd joined the military to excel at what he did best among his own personal reasons, and the SEP had seen that almost immediately.
They'd never publish it, but his invitation to apply for the program had been the first they'd sent out.
He had found an odd sort of camaraderie with Jack during the first impossible task they received, rocky of a start though it had been. It was a favorite tactic of the program: assign more duties and responsibilities than one single man could handle and force them to prioritize or fail altogether trying to make it all work. Forty percent of the applicants were cut before the exercise had even ended.
It had been the first day of bootcamp, and they'd pulled Jack aside as the soldiers had set up what would become their camp for the following two weeks. They'd all assumed it was something clerical, something wrong with his paperwork, something inconsequential. Nothing that concerned them, they were hardly there to focus much on one another as a collective. What happened to one didn't effect the others.
Or at least, going in to the program, it hadn't.
The confusion had been high when Jack had returned on his own, his expression schooled but his eyes clearly panicked.
The commander had called him over to inform him that he would be in charge of the camp. Alone. He'd asked for how long, and the reply had been less than gratifying.
"They laughed," Jack said over celebratory drinks with Gabriel in a quiet corner of an otherwise rowdy pub when the program had been said and done, four or five beers deep into reflecting on the hell they'd endured over the two months. "Like I should've known it was a stupid question. Asked 'em what I was supposed to be doing, you remember what they told me?"
Gabriel had found it easier to relax back then, even if only marginally. His face had twisted in a smirk as he'd lifted his own glass, five empties of his own matching it littering the table between them. "Don't care, just handle it."
"Just take care of it! You'll figure it out!" Jack had smacked his glass against Gabriel's then, neither quite aware enough to pay mind to the slosh of foam that escaped to the table below at the contact. The blond had squinted after knocking back a generous chug, using the stein for emphasis as he jabbed it at Gabriel. "Well on my way to crashing and burning on the first day if you hadn't been there, y'know that?"
Of course he knew.
He'd known exactly what he was doing the second he'd stepped in all that time ago.
It had been clear Jack was suitably flipped out at the realization that he had no idea what it was exactly they expected of him, but the younger man had hid it admirably, he had to admit. Jack had been invited to join the program due to his burgeoning leadership skills, basic though they might have been at the time. Gabriel had watched from afar as Jack had formed ranks of a sort among the few men in their little "battalion," delegating survival tasks and laying out ground rules he figured were applicable. It had worked, for a bit.
The job probably wouldn't have been quite so difficult if the group hadn't literally been chosen for their inwardly turned, laser-like focus.
There was something almost gladiatorial about the whole situation that clearly didn't settle well with their little squadron. For some more than others, it was difficult to willingly stoop and pick up the slack left by the lesser capable applicants when you were trying your damnedest to make your own work look worth the time and effort the SEP required. The entire exercise was futile in the end, as there was only so much team work the group was willing to commit themselves to whenever the chance to one-up their companions arose. After all, they'd all been assigned their own roles by the official commander before Jack had given them the instructions he saw fit as well. By the end of the first day, about half of the materials they'd needed made it back to the camp, and it had been clear Jack had failed miserably.
They'd learn after the fact that that was what the SEP investors were expecting.
The whole task had been meant to see how the inductees would prioritize their work under lesser authority. But really, it was more about knocking them all down a few pegs so they knew exactly where they stood in the grand scheme of things. Learning to recognize odds and deciding what would and wouldn't fly was more important to the SEP than being an overachiever in the end.
Subtlety was their lesser-advertised speciality.
"Never would have picked your scrawny ass to run that shitshow." Gabriel had been slowing on the drinks by then, but the conversation ran its course all the same as Jack had set his own finished stein on the table and looked appreciatively over their fellow celebrating SEP inductees around them.
"They thought I looked too comfortable," he'd said with the air of a man who knew he was well on his way to being drunk but refused to accept it just yet.
Gabriel'd already known that too. He'd asked the second he found the right moment, and one of the captains had brushed him off with the same answer. They'd chosen Jack for the exercise because he'd known exactly what he was signing up for. As one of the younger applicants, he'd signed on for the military with the intent of doing something more than anything he could have in the backwoods of Indiana. Despite his desires to return home after his basic service, however, he'd willingly been shepherded along into the dark alley that was the government's experimental science division.
That hero-complex had to root somewhere, after all, and where better than the charming rurality of the countryside mixed with just enough ego fanning from the military to ensure he wouldn't be leaving anytime soon.
The investors had recognized him for what he truly was despite the glamour he'd been painted with prior to the selection process. A straight-forward, chuck-and-jiving good ol' boy from Bloomington who'd yet to so much as boast despite his steady ascent in skills among his peers. He grew up rigorously, all rough hands and hard work in the fields and fences of his family's farm. A shining golden example of the payoff of rolling up your sleeves and shoveling your way out of the shit you'd been dropped in with a smile.
So Jack had gone in to the program surrounded by the obvious signs of being in his comfort zone. That first impossible task had worked just as it had been meant to, as he'd been wrenched from that zone entirely and chucked headfirst into the harsh reality that would become the rest of his life.
When Overwatch was created a few short years later, of course, that zone may well have never existed.
Still, if it hadn't been for that first week of endurance training, Gabriel didn't doubt things would have gone very different. He'd have found a way to get where he needed to be eventually, sure, but it never would have been so easy. The one perk of being tossed in with a bunch of grunts, he supposed.
Three days had passed in a similar fashion of bolstering the men and watching them slowly break themselves apart from each other in favor of building their own personal tasks on the sidelines, and when it had been clear that Jack was slowly losing his cool over the dwindling cooperation among the ranks, Gabriel had spotted his chance.
He'd waited, and he'd watched, and he knew exactly when the moment had been right. He would be chosen for the final program, and he knew precisely how he would be doing it.
Unless there was radiation involved, two heads were always better than one.
Jack had been five seconds from a fist fight with a man who'd lost the makeshift means they'd been using to get their water supply on his way back to the camp when Gabriel had finally stepped in and spoken for the first time the entire week. He had by no means been close to the size he was after they'd injected him full of God only knew what, but he was certainly no twig to begin with. He'd made lesser men turn tail and head for the hills with just a look before the SEP was even a twinkle in the military's eye.
Jack had looked about ready to punch him when he'd stepped between the two men, but he'd pointedly turned his back on the impromptu leader and sized the man who'd cost them a day's worth of water up.
That encounter had only involved a few choice words, but the man had returned hours later with a new supply and was damn happy to do so.
It had been clear at the time that Jack was irked by what he'd considered to be Gabriel's attempts at encroaching on his authority (fake as it may have been at the time), but as the days went by and things were finally getting done with Gabriel's not-so-subtle prodding, he'd accepted the man's presence at his side begrudgingly.
They'd organized the camp too well in the end as a tag-team, as the commander had returned with a head full of steam and declared the exercise over less than a full week in.
Gabriel hadn't missed the way more eyes than usual tended to track him after that.
After the whole debacle was over, the commanders never once spurred humiliation or the damned individuality the investors had been so happy to find in the men to motivate the recruits. They began to rely heavily on a more competitive streak among them, spurring them on to develop a collective us-against-them mentality as they cracked down on their physical and operational behavior as a unit instead. Discipline was beaten into their heads, and the petty sense of me first, then the group that had made the first week so impossible dissipated as each cadet slowly shaped up to fit the mold the military would need them to fill.
Nobody wanted to be the one guy who didn't get it right.
They'd tossed Jack and Gabriel together plenty of times as the months went by, and by the end of the initiation, there wasn't a single exercise they didn't have them running without the other: simulations, technique and tactics, defense, offense, policy, hell, even public speaking was thrown in there once.
"A question for Gabriel Reyes," the moderator had called to the rest of the applicants. About 30 remained, seated scattered about the small auditorium as Gabriel stood at ease on stage beside Jack. Their seated peers had all started on stage along with them, each called back to take a seat as they had ultimately failed to answer a question as the moderator saw fit. As more filed into the seats from the stage, they had become the ones to ask the pressing questions they all knew they would be presented with upon completion of the program. The moderator had been more than happy to hand the interrogation off to the men and women behind him, as they collectively formed enough mind-warping questions to weed out who would remain by the end of the week and who would not.
Only Gabriel and Jack had remained on stage in the end, and the entire exercise had quickly boiled down to seeing who the seated soldiers could stump first.
They both had their own brands of confidence. And unfortunately for their interrogators, the stubborn streak between them was easily twenty miles long.
Neither had planned to back down.
"A question, if you would please."
The auditorium was silent at the moderator's press. They'd been at this for over an hour, each question more in depth than the last and yet so expertly handled that they could do little but watch in awe as the two men on stage fairly danced around them.
As the silence had grown and the moderator had stood to turn and stare the soldiers down, a lone voice had risen from the back of the room.
"Either of you ever seen Jaws?"
Gabriel was irrationally proud to admit that Jack had been the one to snort first.
The weeks had blended together after that, the end in sight and the stakes high as the last of the men and women present were pushed to their absolute limits and beyond. The hesitant, distrustful vibes Jack had held for Gabriel in the beginning had all but vanished long before they'd wrapped up their training, and the two flew through the paces.
A target fell, the smoke from the colored pellet tinted red as it rose from the hole scorched through it. Jack's own blue pellet soared high over the swinging bag as Gabriel's bullet knocked it off center.
"You born in a barn, Morrison? Because damn, that was messy."
A practical explosion of blue powder as Jack stole Gabriel's next line of twenty targets. A loud sniff as he reloaded, the smile threatening the corners of his lips not quite breaking all the way through as Gabriel pinned him with a stare.
"I wouldn't know. I was born very young."
The proctors had only written "chatty" under the "cons" portion of their checklists that day.
Gabriel never really knew when exactly he'd actually begun to think of the younger man as a friend and not simply a means to an end.
But it happened all the same, and the two built a steady reputation by the time the remains of the SEP applicants had pulled their heads out long enough to look around. The sheer caliber of their trash-talk on the field couldn't be challenged, and their dynamic baffled the investors and scientists alike.
The ending of the program had been almost underwhelming. The two of them had known for some time that there was a reason they'd been paired up for virtually everything, and had long since discussed what the future might hold in store. They'd gotten used to each others' company, almost grown to appreciate it, even. With barely a glance or a flick of a hand, each seemed to know what the other intended to do. In the two months (one of which was spent in shallow loathing and distrust by half the party involved) they'd known each other, they'd single-handedly altered the course of history and would never truly know it until long after the war was over.
And it had all pivoted on the selfish means of a single man willing to talk a man into fetching a day's worth of water.
"Ever wonder if it's worth it?" Jack was always the one to bring the existential bullshit into play, and that time had been no different as they'd sat at one of the tables in the middle of the track, Gabriel halfway through a sandwich from the canteen and Jack sitting backwards on the bench, his elbows up and planted behind him as he leaned back against the table.
They'd long since passed the point where they knew they'd be inducted into the program by then. The final rounds of testing were more a formality than anything else. Fifteen percent of the original inductees remained.
Gabriel hadn't bothered looking up from his platter as he picked a suspicious glob of something or rather out of the lettuce on his plate and jerked a thumb at it. "They're trying to kill us with this shit, so my vote's a solid no."
Jack had given him a long, bewildered look at that. Two months of blood sweat and grime together and he'd figured out plenty about the other man. But despite all that time, he still hadn't quite figured out the difference between Gabriel's serious-as-a-heart-attack voice and his I-couldn't-be-screwing-with-you-more-if-I-had-a-powerdrill voice.
Gabriel was fine with that.
The day the ceremony rolled around was uncomfortable and lackluster for everyone involved.
All parade-uniform clad and stiff spined, the dozen or so successful applicants endured hours of men they'd never met preaching their progress and only acknowledging them when strictly necessary. They'd stood in a line, the size of the ceremony small enough to make the whole affair ridiculous. Talk of the SEP was still being held in hushed tones, so to celebrate so publicly a program that would not make an ounce of sense to the few who had been privileged enough to gain an invitation made little sense to them.
Personal victory was nonexistent among the group. It was, simply put, not allowed. Their accomplishments as a group were heralded, which was only more difficult to process. The program had managed to take a group of overreaching, individualistically motivated strivers and forced them into a team.
It was all awfully backwards to Gabriel, but as long as he'd made it where he'd needed to be, he was fine with the outcome.
The man who they'd been told to respect with not a reason why had been speaking for twenty minutes about his own accomplishments before he so much as glanced back to the line of soldiers trying their damnedest to not picture a rope around his neck. Gabriel'd stood with the expression of a man who'd just washed down an entire lemon with half a bottle of vodka, and Jack had managed to find the perfect balance of aloof authority and boredom sometime ten minutes in.
"We are honored," the man had crowed, "to introduce our initiates for the Soldier Enhancement Program, effective immediately. What you see before you, ladies and gentlemen, is the future. Our future."
Our future.
Not your future, not their future. Our future.
The unspoken truth of it was hideously understated. The futures of the applicants were no longer their own to hold, and they knew it.
The SEP owned them now, and they couldn't be more obvious about the matter if they tried.
He'd finally acknowledged the soldiers directly then, as a stern woman made her way slowly down the line, clipping a small ribbon to each of the applicants' lapels.
"Your continued presence here does not mean that you have won." Gabriel'd caught the look Jack shot him from the corner of his eye as he'd stared blankly back at the speaker. They were idiots if they thought the men didn't know that.
"But," the speaker had continued, a touch of drama in his tone that sickened Gabriel to his core, "it means you have not yet lost either."
He supposed that was true enough.
But hell if it hadn't felt like a victory when they'd placed him and him alone in command of Overwatch another year or so down the line.
Not Jack, not anybody else.
Him.
So he supposed he did not think himself a patient man. He was a patient man, and he could play the long game far past the time any sane man would back out if needs be.
But patience only holds up so well against sheer bureaucracy.
The day the summons had come for him to stand before the board for their final decision on his demotion after all he had done, all they had done to him, all he had given for Overwatch was the day that long game became an absolute marathon.
Because if he couldn't have what he'd fought tooth and nail for, then he would live to see it rot from the inside out.
A/N: just some Gabriel character study that was a long time coming from me tbh
I have another one-shot that goes into more detail regarding their bootcamp time in mind, so if anybody is interested let me know and I'll get right on that!