Evil Ways
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe,
that lures him to evil ways.
— The Buddha
Lost. I've lost him. He's gone.
Mercy undulates in and out of consciousness, carried by these thoughts.
Gone. Dead. Declare him . . .
Flashes of days long past, march of omnics and endless gunfire, warm blood in matted hair. Moving, moving, keep moving. Save as many as possible. So strange to see first-hand the advantages of automatons over humans, a God Program defeating discrete intelligence, metal prevailing over flesh. A machine can be patched, rewritten, sent out again; a human requires transfusions, surgery, cognitive therapy. Tranquilizers for the nightmares.
It saved her, this wall she erected between herself and her patients. Saved many others. She drifted over landmines and siege units to lift the wounded from danger. She lost many, so many, and she bravely declared them, still faces beneath white sheets, before moving on to the next. Always another. And when her field work was done, an era of research was her reprieve, dabbling over subjects like Genji Shimada. Was it then that this protective wall had begun to crumble?
She cries when she first wakes, sobbing alone in a cold, black cell. She lies curled-up in the corner, wrists bound, fading in and out of sleep. She sees him over and over, Genji laid out across the rocks, the dark cavity in his skull, neon green of guttering lights. She sees herself reaching out again and again, useless, useless. Reaching out to somehow undo this death for which she is completely responsible.
The brave Doctor Ziegler of the past has gone, dissolved in bitter tears.
#
Reaper watches her through the monitors, not trusting himself, at first, to be alone with her.
What has she done to him? The audacity of that kiss as she stared death in the face, what he took at the time to be desperation, jogged in him the memories of the night she invoked, memories of her body, her regret. He let her go, yes, both of those times. And she's come back. Any shred of humanity left in him would fear the hunger that is now clawing its way to the surface. He stares at the monitors with greed.
The warmth he pulled from her . . . he shuts his eyes, trying once more to recapture it. It was the first time he felt anything close to human in so many years. How close can he get, he wonders, to this feeling again? How long will this caged canary last with him using her in such a way?
She will have many uses, he thinks. There have been many ways to justify her to the council. In the end, they have allowed him to keep her. For now.
He takes a deep breath. It leaves him shaking.
He cuts the video feed to the holding cells. There can be no record of this.
Let her live, he thinks as he descends. Let her live. Let her live.
#
Mercy scarcely raises her head when Reaper enters the cell. She lowers it again, cracked lips and red eyes disappearing behind her arm. He lingers at the cell door. She remains still, too weak to cry any longer.
"From now on," Reaper says, "you will do everything I say."
She shakes her head into the crook of her arm.
"I'm not giving you a choice."
She looks at him now, wearily. He wants to bite some life back into that pale lip. He restrains himself.
"You've already been a good little lure," he says. "Now what else can I get out of you?"
"Nothing," she says at last. "There is nothing."
He chuckles. "You can speak."
"Please. I don't have anything that you could possibly want."
"Oh, I think you do."
She pauses. In a whisper: "Please don't kill anyone else because of me."
"Again." He begins to cross the room. "I'm not giving you a choice."
She lowers her head and does not make any attempt to escape. He stops with half a room between them, curious at her lack of fear.
"The cyborg dies, and you're giving up for good, are you?"
She closes her eyes, serene in her despair.
"What a brave face. Still just an act. I've seen the real you, after all."
She turns away once more. Her teeth touch her lip — he's gotten to her.
He advances again, and she shrinks away from his shadow. "Beneath all of this, you're just a scared little girl starving for affection. It mattered to you so much that just one person on this planet hated you. Bothered you so much that you gave yourself to me — threw yourself at me. Yes. I remember. And to save yourself — you did it again. I sense a pattern, Doctor Ziegler."
He grasps the cord knotted around her wrists and drags her up against the wall. Still she looks away. He leans over her. Even in this cold cell, she radiates warmth, such sweet warmth.
"You will do as I say," he utters.
"You'll have to kill me," she says.
He chuckles again, amused at this challenge. He forces his pelvis against hers, invoking that night now a decade past, and a wince briefly flickers across her face, is gone again.
He brings the mouth of his mask to her ear. "I want you to imagine all of the things I'm going to do to you."
Her quickening heartbeat betrays her serenity.
"You were so curious about what we did in Blackwatch. And then came all that uproar once everything was blown wide open. Murder. Kidnapping. Torture. It's all true. All of it."
His fingers curl beneath her chin, stroking with a controlled gentleness.
"Would you like to see what I can do?" he says.
Her eyes are shining now, large, frightened. She swallows hard.
"What do you want?" she stammers.
"You." He runs his fingers through her hair, pulls her head back, bears down. "All of you. Until there's nothing left."
#
Three Shimada hit men, their white button-downs spattered with blood and sweat, knelt in a row before Reyes. One of the men was whimpering beneath his hood, the others resolute in their silence. Reyes paced before them, eternally patient. Genji perched nearby, staring murderously, while McCree lounged in the doorway behind them both.
"Hanzo is gone?" Genji hissed.
None of the captive men spoke. The whimpering one wriggled uncomfortably. Reyes had tied their arms back so tightly that their shoulders would dislocate with any sudden movement. He sent a warning glance to Genji as he continued pacing.
"We already have this intelligence," he said.
Genji's seething red eyes settled on him. "You already knew?"
Reyes nodded.
"Where did he go?" Genji roared, advancing on the men with scarcely-contained rage.
Still the men didn't speak, though the whimpering one cringed away as far as his bindings would allow. Reyes thrust himself between him and Genji, forcing Genji to take several steps back.
"Cool off," he said.
"Hanzo decides that he must murder his brother to obey the elders," Genji cried, "and then he abandons the clan altogether?"
"Our job here," Reyes said in measured tones, "is to pick apart this power vacuum that he left behind. Either control yourself or get out of this interrogation."
Genji's hands clenched and unclenched again. Quick as lightning, a shuriken slipped between his knuckles, and he flung it at the silent figures. One of the men went down, choking on blood. The whimpering man cried out and fell beside him, shrieking at once at the double-pop of his arms leaving their sockets.
"Take a walk, Shimada!" Reyes shoved Genji back, and Genji stalked away. McCree slid to one side, allowing him to pass. He tipped his hat at Reyes, who jerked his head to the two fallen men.
"Get them both out of here. One to solitary and one to the morgue. There's still plenty to wring out of this last one."
McCree sauntered over. "Can't I just put this guy down and save myself a trip?"
Reyes simply scowled, and McCree laughed. "Just a joke, hombre. I'll be right back." He hauled the injured man over his shoulder and dragged the corpse away by the ankles.
Reyes rolled his eyes and turned back to his final captive. The man hadn't moved an inch, although sweat had collected at the lining of his hood, dripping in heavy drops. Reyes walked a slow circle around him, cracking his knuckles. He drew a cattle prod from his belt, struck his own thigh and switched it on, letting the air between them crackle.
"Now," he said as he approached. "You're going to talk."
As he worked, Reyes found himself distracted. Genji's outbursts, though no more frequent than usual, were pissing him off more and more. Though it was certainly possible that the cyborg might become more liability than asset, this was not what was on Reyes's mind. No. It was Angela Ziegler. Had been Angela Ziegler, ever since that night.
It was vexing. Before then, he had never seen her that way, never anything more than — what had she called him? A colleague. And hurt had brought her to him. Genji had brought her to him. And ever since, she'd been avoiding Reyes, blushing deeply whenever they'd pass in the halls, staring pointedly at her notes during each meeting to discuss Genji's progress. As though nothing had ever happened between them at all.
He remembered, vaguely, a phrase he had once heard. The fulfillment of desire is the end of desire. How fortunate for her, when she had sparked in him something so new, something he'd never even known was there.
It was difficult, during this interrogation, to keep his actions methodical and composed, to not channel his own frustration into the careful violence with which he operated. Every time Angela would glance away from him and blush, he'd see her in bed, flushed and gasping. He was overcome with the urge just to touch her white arm, spurred by the thought of pinning her in the doorway. In moments alone he'd think of her head in his lap and grow hard, painfully so.
And she wanted Genji. That raging psychopath.
Before long, Reyes's captive fell limp. Reyes switched off his cattle prod and grunted with annoyance, and this was when McCree returned, whistling some cowboy tune.
"Guess I missed the fun," McCree said, nudging the hooded head with the toe of his boot.
Reyes spit on the floor. "We'll leave him here," he said. "I'll finish this once he wakes up."
"What about the other guy?"
"If he doesn't talk, neutralize him."
"That's cold, boss."
Reyes glared. "Is there a problem, McCree?"
McCree raised both hands and shook his head with a grin. "No problems here. Lord knows I don't wanna find myself on the wrong side of that cattle prod. Again."
Reyes shoved past him, heading for the door.
"Hey, boss. Swinging by the morgue made me think of somethin funny. Why is it hard for a blond nurse to count to seventy?"
Reyes stopped. McCree was grinning from ear to ear.
"'Cause sixty-nine is quite a mouthful!" He slapped his knee and laughed.
Reyes's scowl deepened. "And what is that supposed to mean?"
McCree's laughter faded to a nervous chuckle. "Uh. Nothin' but a joke, s'all."
Reyes turned and advanced on him, pushing his face close to McCree's. "Is there something you want to say to me?"
"N-no. No, sir."
"Then I suggest you keep your comedy aspirations to yourself. Stay with this guy and call me when he's awake."
McCree nodded, unnerved by the venom in Reyes's voice.
Reyes left, slamming the cattle prod against his thigh with an echoing thud, leaving McCree to wince at an unwelcome memory.
#
How do you torture an angel? First, you strip it of its wings.
Reaper binds Mercy's ankles together and tethers them, along with her wrists, to an eyelet in the wall. She sits with her arms and legs stretched to the wall, knees up, her back to the room, in a well-practiced stress position that served him well in his Blackwatch days. He circles her, observing his work, and lifts his foot, resting the sole of his boot across the base of her wings.
"So how tough are these?" he murmurs, testing his weight against them. Mercy does not respond, eyelashes trembling as she bobs gently from the pressure of his boot.
"What could they be made of? Aramid core, thermoplastic exterior? Feels pretty light." He leans harder, slowly, so that her bindings strain, pulling her arms taut. She exhales in a slow stream, breathes in again. He watches her expression.
"Let's see how they hold up," he says delicately. He brings his foot up and slams it back down again.
She gives a small cry — how pleasurable it is to catch her off guard — and there is a volley of popping sounds as the tendons in her arms stretch, nearly snapping. She gasps at the pressure of the Valkyrie suit compressing her chest and throat, and the wings do not give way, straining beneath his foot with a beautiful resistance.
"Impressive." Reaper holds her for a few moments more before easing off without quite releasing her. She coughs, shudders, and still she tries to hide any trace of pain, breathing in slowly, breathing out again.
This does not deter him. He bears down on the wings again, much more slowly, and at his full weight the tears spring from her eyes, running in silent lines to wet her hairline. The joints of the right wing begin to creak, and he grinds down with his heel, working the segmented plastic from its socket. She's looking at him now, her head tilted back to its limit, and her lips are working, uttering some silent plea, and he raises his foot again and brings it back down, the right wing snapping free with a shriek of plastic.
A short sob from Mercy then as she shudders toward the wall. Her right arm juts at an odd angle — the elbow has dislocated. He kneels behind her, caressing her forearms, and he grips the ball of her elbow, squeezing hard.
"Stop," she gasps, weeping now. "Stop. Please, stop."
Her arm shakes hard in his grip, wrists straining. He touches his cheek to hers, the angles of his mask prodding the softness of her skin. He clenches his hand into a fist, and she cries out as her elbow levers back into place.
"Much better," he says, and he stands again.
"Please." She bows her head, unable to look at him. "Please."
He nudges the mangled wing, which dangles from a twist of wires and plastic. "We're not done yet."
He rears up and snaps the left wing beneath his foot, her arms yanking taut again. Her scream is sudden, surprised. He seizes both wings and twists them until the wires snap. He tosses them away. They skitter across the floor and come to rest in a crumpled heap.
She weeps, shrinking from him. He stares down at her, his chest beginning to rise and fall. He has not anticipated the thrill that is building inside him. He wants, at once, to feed it, to watch it grow. He strokes her neck, tracing the line of her jaw with his fingertips, feeling her tremble.
"And we are just getting started," he whispers, lifting his mask to kiss the dampness of her scalp.
#
Mercy was once taught, early in her Overwatch career, how to survive torture, should the need arise. She has never had to call upon these lessons until now.
Ana Amari, the most experienced of them all, opened with a very basic command: a person facing torture must first understand that all hope is gone.
Mercy and the other agents shifted with discomfort. There were some "hmmphs" of disbelief, a nervous chuckle. But Ana stared each of them in the face, deadly serious. Hope is a death sentence to one who faces torture, she explained. One must accept that their torturer will not feel sorry, will not yield, will only escalate with time. There must be no hope of rescue. Only then can the pain be properly dealt with.
Reaper works on her with a practiced rhythm, alternating long, slow doses of pain with sudden cuffs and blows. He speaks to her very softly, explaining everything he is about to do, and his deep voice drips with intimacy, as though he is taking her to bed. He strips her of what remains of her Valkyrie suit and binds her into what he refers to as the "Worship God" position: on her knees, wrists knotted in prayer over her chest, and her head forced back over the cell's lone metal cot, her back arched at a forty-five degree angle.
Abandon all hope, she thinks, as the stress crackles up her spine.
It's both nearly impossible and surprisingly easy to do. Genji is dead, after all. Overwatch is long dispersed, and her contacts in Iraq know nothing of her abduction in Nepal. She will not be leaving this place, and he will not let her go. What else can she do but surrender to her fate?
"Interrogation is pointless," Ana assured them, "when you do not resist the pain. Escaping this pain no longer matters to you. You embrace it as a companion. Accept it. Welcome it, even. Only then will your captors have no power over you."
Accept it, Mercy tells herself. Welcome it. A companion. A friend.
She can tell before long that he is getting worked up, perhaps even entertained by the fact that she will tell him nothing. He shrugs off his coat and prowls the room, and she can feel the penetration of his gaze through the eyes of the death's-head mask. He plies her with a list of names — Lena Oxton, Fareeha Amari, Jesse McCree — and she answers nothing, blinking rapidly at the bruises on her wrists, her abdomen, imagining internal bleeding, a punctured kidney.
He kneels in front of her at one point, tracing the curve of her throat with a clawed finger. She swallows involuntarily.
"You're only encouraging me," he says, and he laughs.
"Even if you must go insane," Ana told them, "insanity is better than what your captor has in store for you."
Reaper stands then and straddles her. She hears his belt of ammunition open and thud to the ground. He grasps her skull and she shuts her eyes. She shudders, despite herself, when he invades her mouth.
In one of her earliest letters to Genji, she wrote, How on Earth did you deal with the pain? In his response he explained mindfulness to her for the very first time. With pain you must let go of all expectations. You cannot fix it. You cannot dispel it. You must engage with the pain just as it is.
Are these her only two choices? To continue to suffer with such acute awareness, or to go completely insane? She tries to relax her body, even as her beleaguered muscles throb, her jaw aching around him. What if she is to bite him now — will he kill her then?
She chances a look at him, and he is merely watching her, his breath low and measured, in control. He holds her steady and grinds into the back of her throat, and she gags, unable to breathe. She fights her bindings and his thighs squeeze her throat. Her vision swims. She has the sensation of falling, of drifting, of falling again. His mask ripples back into view, a skull, the shaved white scalp, and he crushes her throat again and she is gone, sinking, engulfed by a black tide.
#
She dreams of songbirds, tea leaves, the crispness of mountain snow. Genji's mouth against hers, the buzzing warmth of him in their nest of drapes. Gabriel Reyes staring at her from across the dark room, indicating the spot beside him on the bed. The regret she carried after that night, as though she committed some infidelity against the man who hated her so much.
These two men, so different, and so intimately is she acquainted with their bodies, Reyes's carefully-trained violence, Genji's fury. The weapon she built of Genji with her own two hands, the line she crossed with Reyes, all for the guilty pleasure of forgetting. She feels that all of this is her own doing, all of it her fault.
She wakes in a stupor, not recognizing where she is. She blinks at near-total darkness, slow to realize that she is on a bed, wrists still tied, stripped naked now. She turns this way and that. A white face peers at her through the darkness, Reyes, Reaper without his mask, eyes black as sockets, flesh bloodless as a corpse.
He does not move at first. He merely observes as she slowly comes to on the bed. The pain is beginning to set in, originating first from a dull thud inside her skull, and it travels down her body in a slow wave, the aching jaw, the swelling elbow, the bruises across her abdomen and back. She writhes once, weakly, and does not move any more.
"You're strong," Reaper says at last, sounding somehow both fascinated and disappointed. "I suppose I should have known. You're quick to tears but you endure. I'm impressed."
She does not look at him.
"Though it's only been one day, after all." He gets up, crosses the room. She's too exhausted to cringe away. "It's in your power to end this at any time."
"You're not going to let me go," she murmurs.
He reaches down and plays with her hair. Shock of cold — he's removed his gloves.
"No," he says.
He takes her by the shoulders and turns her gently onto her side. He climbs into bed and nestles against her back. She can feel the iciness of his flesh beneath the hard plates of his body armor. He cups her breast and runs his hand down her hip, and he kisses her, softly, repeatedly, on the cheek, the throat, the shoulder.
"You have a choice," he whispers.
She says nothing, closes her eyes. His frigid breath on her ear. His hand slides between her legs, presses there. She shivers.
"You will tell me what I want," he says. One finger slips inside, two. "Or you can test this endurance of yours against everything I have." Three. "There is so much more I can do. I will take you apart. Piece by piece. First your mind." His fingers sink deeper, clench hard, cold, so cold. "Then your body. Not with blades. Or machines. My preference is tension wire. With just a little brute force."
She imagines herself cut into pieces. A fitting end, she thinks sadly, for dismantling Genji so. For bringing death to him.
"I'm not afraid of you," she says.
He grips her head and twists it, forcing her to meet his eyes. He withdraws his fingers, taking a breath, and then slides them back in. She grits her teeth.
"Please test me," he says. He kisses her, greedy, consuming, and he opens his mouth and bites her chin, sinking his canines into her lower lip. She writhes, his fingers still working, and he chuckles, pressing his erection against her.
"Give yourself up," he murmurs, retracting his hand to undo his belt, and he pushes his length between her legs, causing her to cringe. "If you give yourself to me . . . I will keep you from the other members of Talon. If you tell me what I want . . . you will be safe."
She blinks back tears. She thinks of her dream, of birds and snow and paradise. Transcendence. Of Genji, who once was convinced his cyborg body had been robbed of a soul, and went on to seek enlightenment, free from the concerns of pain and anger. She breathes in deep, searching her mind for serenity. The birdsong from her dream lulls her into something like a trance.
#
Reaper takes her, gripping her tightly, pouring himself into her warmth. Her heat fills him, spreading through the surface of his skin into the very depths of his body. She does not fight, limp in his arms, and when he feels her fading again he slows, allows her to blink herself back into consciousness. He wants her to feel every moment of this.
The orgasm builds, slow, unfamiliar. It's been five years since his untimely death, and he has felt nothing close to sexual desire in so long. There is something significant to him in forcing her to experience this with him, to perhaps experience it many times more, if she will allow him to let her live.
He gasps. The heat in him rises. He can almost feel the blood in his veins, a hint of his own heart. She turns her face away, pressing it to the sheets. He brings her back, holding her steady, locking his eyes to hers.
Her pale mouth opens, and he sees her again in his bed, pink and coming, nails in his back, so close to him and so distant, gone to her own plane of existence.
He comes, gasping, shuddering into her. Her eyes grow distant, gazing at something beyond his reach. He shudders again, emptying. He wraps his arms around her. The warmth is already beginning to fade.
They lie together in silence. He is spent, fighting to return his breath to normal. She doesn't move, awash in hard-fought tranquility.
#
In the mountains of Nepal, a fine layer of snow has fallen during the night, coating everything in silver dust.
The puddle of blood-substitute has long dried, clumping in the snow. Soon it will whisk away in the slightest wind, dissolving into nothing. Genji lies facedown on the mountain path. His visor has cracked from the bullet hole in his skull. The power source attached to the stem of his brain has been slowly cycling down, limping along due to the stores in the backup cells that line his spine. His body has gone into full paralysis, but a weak signal still throbs in his brain, leaping from neuron to neuron in a steady pulse.
The first monks find him during their morning walk. One flees back to the monastery as the other gingerly lifts him from the snow. The monk staggers beneath his weight, softly repeating a mantra, over and over, as he carries the unmoving Genji back home.
###