I.

He hates the guile of history.

How it can sneak up on you when you least expect it and wrap its hands around your throat.

One second, he's there, present, standing in his gray quarters with their clinical angles and sparse furnishings, and he's looking at Sombra, her sweep of hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and eyes red rimmed.

Then she says, "I'm not a fucking child" and—

—he's back in Zũrich, in his office, watching Fareeha's eyes well up under the faint, humming light of his monitors

"I am not a child!"—

But that's how it always works, isn't it? We spend our lives walking, marching, running from the past, racing towards some imagined future, only to run face first into where we've already been.

He's never seen her show much beyond a subterfuge of emotion and the unfamiliarity unsettles him. Her mascara has been smudged into wide, black circles and her eyes are almost lost, like deep wells or empty sockets. She looks like a skull—back to where you started, he thinks, or, maybe, I've just killed you.

—Fareeha wasn't wearing make up when she had come to him with her final appeal, after her mother had said no, and he had felt a different kind of twinge.—

"You can't stop me." Sombra wipes her eyes on her sleeve and he decides that the past is a brick wall that you run into again and again and again, until you're all out of teeth and spitting up bled.

"I never said I would."

"I know that look, Gabriel," she spits his old name and now he's seeing Ana. "I know you're laying out a million of your careful little plans right now. I know you think you know best and—"

—"You all think you can tell me what to do. Like I don't know anything"—

"Sombra." He doesn't mean to say her name then how he often does, like a chastisement for a mission gone sour, but he spent more of his life in command than out and it's so steeped into his bones that that's just the tone his ruin of a voice takes when he's stressed.

"No, fuck you. I'm going. I'm not risking them figuring it out. She won't let me fix it. You know she won't. She'll wanna stick me with needles and put me in a test tube."

It's true. He feels the way his cells are constantly in flux, shifting and dying and necroticizing before sparking back into some-kind-of-life, a constant, dull ache punctuated by occasional sparks of agony. He knows Moira sowed what he now reaps without an inch of hesitation.

Human life, she had said, was just a cluster of cells. We needn't mourn an altered or deceased body anymore than shed skin and cut hair. The only difference is the quantity of cells.

And, suffering, she had claimed, was a tool of change.

How many now? As they're standing there arguing, how many cells are there now?

There's a stretch of silence beyond her bitter cries and he feels, for the first time in years, a fresh kind of regret. He'd kept things clean until now; uncomplicated. He'd washed his hands of a need for attachment and release until, suddenly, he hadn't.

—"You can't stop me. I'm going to enlist."—

"I'm going. Just let me go. Once it's all sorted, I'll spring what I need to."

And he realizes that, with Fareeha, in the face of her young defiance, he had felt almost like a father, but, looking at Sombra, all he feels like is a fool.

"Talon—"

"Won't find me. I disappeared once. I can do it again."

And, when he speaks, it's something like an echo bubbling up from the past, something from when he'd been whole, reaching out from way back when. It comes out like a reflex and, as soon as he says it, he knows he's truly fucked.

"You're not capable of doing it alone."

Her eyes narrow and he realizes she's misread him entirely. "I've been through worse. Or do you think I'll lose mi valor and—"

"I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about setting things in motion. It's too early—"

"You don't know—"

"—And you couldn't stick to a plan if you were nailed to it."

"What, so you need to babysit me?"

"If I don't, you'll get yourself killed."

"You can just say you want to come with me."

"It's not—"

Her face shifts into a sarcastic, faux-flirtatious smile. "Oh, Gabi, I think you're in love with me."

He grits his teeth. "Get what you need together and get ready for the mission, Sombra."

He untethers into a spiral of smoke and evaporates from the room, and he thinks the past is a wall and I've got bleeding on the brain.