"… you know how many people even vote in your average US election?" Gabriel says. "I mean, by percentage of the population."

"Later, Reyes."

It's time to run the gauntlet again, another trip to the UN for a public shaming pretending to be a hearing, walking through a crowd of protesters that used to be fans, not so long ago. Jack knows what's happening - the tides have changed, and all those politicians who were so glad to shake their hands and pose on the front page are finding it more convenient now to look the other way, to pretend they'd never really been in favor of Overwatch.

Jack keeps his expression blank and his eyes forward, ignoring the jeers and shouts and waving signs - background noise. He's heard worse. He's not about to say that anything they do is perfect. No organization ever is, but these people don't seem to understand what they're for, or how they operate, or even /care/ - or realize that getting rid of Overwatch won't also get rid of what's prowling on the other side, the buffer zone he's been working most of his life to maintain, to protect-

He jerks back, catching the movement from the corner of his eye, dodging out of reflex - but it's Gabriel who plucks the bottle out of the air, and turns, staring out across a crowd that goes suddenly silent under the weight of his thousand-yard stare.

Jack feels the hair rise on the back of his neck, standing close enough to see Reyes' eyes flicking back and forth in tiny, familiar movements - picking out targets in the crowd. The best options for the most chaos, for controlling the panicked mob as they try to escape. Maximum casualties.

"Stop it." Jack snaps, too quiet for anyone else to hear.

Gabriel grins, the same reckless, vicious smile Jack has seen on a thousand battlefields - in ice and mud and midnight skies lit up like a desert noon - but never like this, never a part of the civilized world - and was that edge always there? It lingers at the corner of his mouth - hungry, and empty.

"Do you ever wonder if we might have saved these people a little /too/ well?"


Jack keeps up with the feeds wherever he's at - local news and international wire and useful Twitter accounts from people who really ought to know better, along with several less accessible databases where they're just now maybe realizing nobody ever cancelled the deceased Strike Commander's security clearance.

The rifle had been too high-profile to snatch unnoticed, but Jack needed it out of the hands he's certain it had been destined for - and so the clock started ticking. If he hadn't been marked before that, he certainly was after. No word yet in the public sphere, and he doubts they'll ever bother - Jack Morrison works much better as a martyr, a vague sketch of noble sentiments in the shape of a man.

It's easy to be beloved when you're no longer in the way.

He keeps an eye on all the watch lists, all the most wanted - domestic and international - and he's got local police dispatch buzzing in his ear right now, the comforting steadiness of professional calm, stating the facts - "be advised all units… shots fired downtown… two males heavily armed and dangerous proceeding down Main toward West 15th… subjects confirmed as Jamison Fawkes and Mako Rutledge."

Junkrat and Roadhog. Blown in like a bad storm. It looks like they might be robbing a bank - or at least blowing things up in the vicinity of a bank. Jack's visor can bridge most of the gap from where he's standing, a few miles away and seventy stories up - but there's a lot of noise, smoke and fire - and there's the SWAT team, dark vans coming up fast from the highway, another helicopter roaring in, passing right by the building Jack's standing on and moving fast.

It's not going to be enough, he thinks, not even for basic containment. Crowd control, if they're lucky, and if the two men get bored quickly and decide to wander off for greener and more flammable pastures. Where they're from this is an average day, maybe even a little less challenging than they're used to. Six blocks of downtown already look like a war zone - he sees the gout of fire, as another car explodes, though it takes an extra moment for the sound to reach him.

A man like Jack ought to be there. Herding the fight to a less populated location, figuring out what they might try for an escape route and 'encouraging' them to take it before moving in for containment. This is the kind of fight he grew up with - big and unanticipated and ugly, with the risk of heavy collateral damage. The police are doing their best, but they just don't have the resources- they're no Overwatch. No one is.

People are going to die down there, if they haven't already. Innocent people. A man like Jack…

He turns away, moving across the rooftop to the other side of the building. A tower too sleek and pretty to be considered an office complex half-built into a hillside, and just far enough from the city and at the wrong angle to the highway for most people to give it a second thought. A subsidiary of a subsidiary of a branch co-owned by your fine friends and neighbors at the Vishkar Corporation. Jack's seen that name around more and more of late, and he likes it less each time.

What Roadhog and Junkrat are now is an unexpected opportunity, his best chance to infiltrate the building with everyone's eyes elsewhere, and all external resources tied up and likely to ignore any alarm bells from private companies on the edge of their jurisdiction.

"Officer down on Main. Ambulance attending. Fire and Rescue proceeding down Shaw, requesting backup. All northbound units fall back to support positions. Be advised, suspects are carrying heavy nonstandard modified munitions of unknown capacity."

Head in the game, Morrison. You keep stopping to put out every single fire, and they'll have you just like they did before.

It's been a few years now, and he's still not entirely sure who 'they' are. As if there's really ever a 'they' at all.

It's Talon, obviously - which means Blackwatch, and several potential global conglomerates with the liquid assets and the wherewithal to hire or fund them. Government connections threading through the whole mess, to be sure - but even with everything that's happened, Jack's not quite paranoid enough to start stringing threads between pictures on any bulletin boards. With twenty years of perspective, he's seen how these things operate - mutual patterns of overlapping self-interest between bastards big and small - temporary alliances that might look like some grand conspiracy at the right angles, but is mostly just the same old individual greed moving into momentary alignment.

The real mistake Jack made was ever thinking Overwatch existed outside their boundaries, that somehow he'd helped create something that big and that powerful that stood outside the system, and wasn't beholden to the same laws that governed every other group just like it.

Which is why he's here now, alone.

"I believe that we may be of some use to each other."

Or not. Jack has the gun up in a half a heartbeat, aware even as he's turning that it's already too slow, that if his opponent wanted to attack he'd already have two or three bullets in his back by now.

No… he'd be impaled on a sword.

Genji Shimada he knows more by reputation and report than any time they'd spent together. Jack never had the chance to fight side-by-side with the man and Shimada was mostly covert ops anyway, used to working alone. He read up enough to know that the man was fighting his own blood, often directly - but whatever he might have felt about that, Shimada kept it to himself. No agent ever had much in the way of a private life, and so Jack didn't push further where he didn't have to, didn't go where he wasn't invited. When Genji had said he had to leave Overwatch, a crisis of faith - there was really nothing to do but wish him the best.

A stroke of luck that he'd jumped ship when he had - journeying off to find himself in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere was a decent place to be when everything fell apart - and now, here they are again. Jack lowers the gun, but steps back enough that he might have half a chance if he needs it.

"Soldier 76, is it? It seems I've just won a considerable bet that you're real." Jack can hear the calm amusement in that rebuilt voice, remembers the particulars from one of the psych evals - he was man who preferred to take things lightly, and as a cyborg he kept to the habit. "But which country do you fight for, I wonder?"

"I'm just a soldier." Jack says, hazarding a guess. "You work for the Omnics?"

"I'm doing a favor for a friend." Shimada says. "He believes these people may have some interesting information. Considering your presence here, I assume it must be /very/ interesting indeed."

Omnics it is, then. Jack hadn't been entirely sure what he'd find here, only that it was valuable and he ought to know it. Vishkar has proxy companies and satellite holdings across the globe, poking at all sorts of things that would almost certainly be better left alone. With everything they've thrown at it, all the research, the technology is /still/ not fully understood - what went wrong, why exactly it went wrong. Why some Omnics fight and the others don't - and the ones that don't say it can't happen again, not like the Crisis, but Jack knows there's a perpetual arms race going on just beneath the surface, between encryption and override and a whole lot of people who wouldn't mind the key to an robot army of their own.

How much might the Shimada clan pay, to have such a weapon for an obedient son?

He's standing in the middle of a receiving line with diplomats and royalty, in a suit that doesn't quite fit right even though it was supposed to be bespoke. He wanted to wear the uniform but they wouldn't let him, so he's tugging down the end of his sleeve because he's in Paris, in /Paris/ and most of the time Jack doesn't feel like a hayseed, confident he can fit in just about anywhere but this is Paris and has he ever been anywhere quite like it? Live musicians in the corner and candles everywhere that isn't covered in gold and every woman more elegant than the one before, looking him over as if he's a little boy in his father's shoes and then he hears a light, beautiful laugh, and a slim hand alights on his arm.

"Are you really 'im, then? Our grand 'ero of the Omnic War?"

"Crisis." The correction is a reflex, because no one had ever actually declared war, but he'd never tell a woman this stunning she was wrong on purpose. He remembers lying on the floor in front of the TV doing homework, while his mother watched and re-watched Roman Holiday, until Jack could have been Gregory Peck's understudy - and that's what he thinks of, looking at the woman before him. Glamour and grace and all of it effortless, and the only thing that takes the barest edge off her imposing regality is the slight look of mischief in her smile.

"Jack Morrison, ma'am." Mercifully, he stops himself from saluting.

A man equally as handsome as the woman is steps up to her side, smiling. "Who are you torturing now, cherie?"

"My new friend, Jack." She smiles. On her lips, his name sounds brand-new, a word he's never heard before. "Shall I introduce you? Jack Morrison, my 'usband Gérard Lacroix. My name is Amélie."

He and Genji both look back toward the city, at the sound of another explosion, the sirens and car alarms like a distant forest of chirping crickets.

"The building plans say our best chances are on floor seventeen and floor forty-eight." Jack says. "Forty-eight's right above the main lab, with a few possible routes in that might be hiding backup themselves…"

"… and seventeen is the auxiliary data storage, with what looks like at least one hidden room, and the CDO's office in an adjoining suite." Genji says, no doubt reading the same plans on the inside of his own visor. "Two potential targets, two of us - shall we divide and conquer? It does neither of us any harm to share the information - and we might flip a coin for any more interesting souvenirs?"

It would be much easier this way, take less time, and reduce the chances of getting caught. Jack isn't exactly made for cat burglary, and hadn't been looking forward to having to try for two floors so far apart. He still can't hear Shimada moving, even standing this close. They might get out without anyone ever knowing they were ever there.

So much for your army of one.

He'll do whatever it takes to get the job done, that's the point.

Jack nods. "Fine."

"So… it's a race, then." Genji says, giving a little flick of his fingers in salute. "Ganbatte, ronin."

With a lack of fanfare that is, in a way, /entirely/ fanfare, he steps backward off the roof, dropping fifty stories without a sound. Jack sighs.

"Goddamn show-off cyborgs."

His own descent is much less impressive but it works, rappelling down the side of the building in a few quick movements. The police dispatch has only grown more insistent, and rises up again in the silence.

"Ambulance blocked on Cargill, attempting alternate route on Willow. We have multiple parties trapped the roof at 273 and 275 Main. Fire and Rescue attending. Helicopter down at Highland and West Fifth…"

On this side, the building is all windows, each pane taller than he is. Right now, they're more like mirrors, though Jack can see only a hint of his outline. Everything else is smudged by shadows - a blank, dark space where the rest of him ought to be.

Jack switches off the radio, and gets to work.


One good thing about being dead - no more interviews. Jack had never been good at them, and even worse because everyone just assumed he would be. Years of practice and even a few professional coaches had only dragged him from stilted to passable. When he did talk, it was mostly to follow whatever script he'd been given. The press even used to make fun of him for it, on slow news days - but no one remembers that anymore.

Jack was photogenic, but not particularly personable - laconic was the complimentary term, and Ana would always give him hell, that if he were a woman no one would be impressed by so many one-word answers.

The press forgave him for it, of course, because his actions spoke louder than his words and were more interesting to write about. He looked good enough in the uniform for photo ops, and Gabriel Reyes, charisma bomb, was there to make up for any other failings. Jack was happy to just stand back and watch it happen.

No one remembers that, either. He was the one people might have respected - but Reyes was the one people actually wanted to be around.

"What kind of a name is 'Jack Morrison' anyway? It's like they built you from a kit."

Which was how they met - with Jack being heckled loudly from across a crowded cafeteria, and when his eyes snapped up and the room had gone quiet, Gabriel been grinning back, friendly and also half-hoping for the fight, welcoming it if it came. The way things always were between them, never a dull moment when there could be a jab, and why ever stop at one?

Jack had been the responsible one, level-headed in any situation - /prom king, head boy and fucking hall monitor all in one/. Ana was the brains, the anchor, and they'd only realized how much once she was gone - but Gabriel, he had always been the heart.

In that interview he'll never give, Jack would make sure they understood that - no one had loved Overwatch more than Reyes, no one believed in it more, and all the time it had been falling apart, all the time those friendly taunts were losing their shine - useless government mouthpiece - and turning into something bitter and Jack was too busy, too preoccupied with the job to step back and actually see the job - just how far is their hand up your ass this time, Morrison? - he thinks that Gabriel still held on, that whatever had happened - the love went last.

Jack knows exactly what they'd ask, those imaginary reporters. Feigning sincerity the way they did in those final days, before Overwatch was barred from giving any more interviews. False sympathy with real teeth, because an apology was good but finding out he was lying, or at least making it look that way - well, which sold more, heroism or scandal?

"When did you first realize that something was wrong with Gabriel Reyes?"

As if he hasn't spent a thousand sleepless hours trying to answer that question for himself, staring at whatever ceiling he happened to be under, wondering when he could have seen it, when it might have been early enough to matter. When he's not even sure what it was that went so wrong.

Of course he remembers that day before the UN meeting, remembers the hard, flat light and the way the crowd seemed two-dimensional, like a painted backdrop and Gabriel's eyes glittering as they moved, the tiniest fraction of an inch as he swept the square clean.

He remembers the moment from an argument that could have happened before or after, honestly, for how little that script bothered to change at the end. - "the people are not our enemy, Reyes. - the freely-elected government of the people is not our enemy-" and Gabriel had just looked at him with something like hate and something like pity and "oh, Jack."

Oh, Jack.

It takes him a long time, to think of the soccer game. The sort of subtle intimation he can barely explain to a reporter, even one that's only in his head.

No one now really considers the days just after the Crisis ended, as if it all just went back to normal with fireworks and ticker-tape parades but Jack remembers the missions getting even longer, one after the next and criss-crossing the globe, making sure the places that had been cracked by chaos didn't fall completely apart.

It had been at the end of one of these that he and Gabriel and Ana had stumbled into the bar somewhere past the edge of… Kolkata, maybe? Chased in by the heat, jittery and jet-lagged and technically on leave although that would end long before any of them had the chance to really get their bearings. They'd been like a pack, more than friends by that point - it was disorienting anytime he looked up and didn't have one of them at his side, watching his six.

Ana didn't drink, but Jack and Gabriel were happy to pick up her share to keep the bartender at bay, and she had been tired enough to fall asleep right at the bar, head down on her folded arms, in between where they sat and sipped their beers and watched a soccer match being broadcast on a janky satellite feed from some other distant corner of the globe, the reception so bad he swore they were all on the same team.

Jack cheered for the Hoosiers out of a vague sense of loyalty, and that was all he'd needed, but it seemed like ninety percent of the people he fought with were somewhere between rabid soccer fan - football, it's called football - and face-painting rabid soccer fan. Even Gabriel owned multiple jerseys - home, away, training, prematch training? - and didn't ever understand why Jack made that face.

So he'd grown used to sitting down and watching tiny figures run around on green fields, occasionally raising his glass to toast whenever everyone started cheering, or humming along with the chants that were mostly inarticulate except for the swearing.

He was half-drunk, half-asleep and trying not to list too far in either direction when he heard Gabriel chuckle.

"It's us." He said, and pointed to the screen with the neck of his beer when it was clear Jack wasn't following. "Look."

Jack forced himself to focus on the screen, though it didn't seem much different than any other game. The teams appeared to be fairly well matched, and as he watched they never got near the goal - never got much past the center line, kicks blocked and passes intercepted from one side to the other and back again.

"See… the field, that's history. All of time, everything we're gonna get to see or do." Gabriel rarely got drunk, at least enough to show it, but Jack could hear the slight slur in his words then. "The game, that's us and the Omnics, or us and the insurgents. Or us and… whoever the fuck we're fighting next. The ball goes five meters one way, five the other, and back again - and that's our life, that's everything we'll ever be a part of. Our great contribution. Giving all we've got just to kick that ball five goddamn meters before it gets kicked right back."

At the time, Jack hadn't thought much of it. Maybe he'd said something - five meters was better than nothing - or maybe he hadn't, and maybe Gabriel had shrugged or maybe he hadn't and they'd sat there until Ana woke up abruptly, demanding her weight in peshwari naan.

Gabriel never mentioned it again, and Jack hadn't thought of the moment for years - but looking back now, looking back on that last, flashpoint second in Switzerland, when he and Gabriel /both/ realized they'd been thoroughly fucked by the powers that be, that someone somewhere ran the numbers and decided the entire operation and its squabbling leaders had reached the end of their utility - maybe that was all it took?

In his mind's eye, Jack can see the whole scope of it, just before the building went up. He's taking cover behind the remains of a piece of modern art in the lobby that looked better at that moment than it ever had before. Across the atrium, behind his own bit of cover is Gabriel, reloading. The lights are flickering, all the windows around them are already smashed to nothing but frames of a jagged, midnight sky, everything destroyed by the firefight - and there they are in the middle of it, with a small patch of empty space between them. How much more than five meters? Not so much, not at all.

Gabriel wanted more. He wanted more than a statue and a salute and his name on a plaque somewhere, one more champion of the status quo. He wanted more than five meters of history, of kicking the ball just that little bit forward before it was time to pass it on. Gabriel wanted change, he wanted it to last, and he was willing to destroy his life and Jack's life, Overwatch and Blackwatch and whatever else it took to make that happen.

He still is.