WowWhatALongUsernameIHave prompted:
Tracer gets Winston to modify her chronal accelerator so that she can be intangible/invisible and generally act like a ghost. Chaos ensues.
"Trust me."
"Nothing good ever comes from that phrase. Especially when it's from you."
"Aren't you the least bit curious? I can name five off the top'a my head right now who've said they don't believe in 'em. Think of their faces when they think they've seen one."
"…"
"You hesitated."
"…"
"You want to know."
"…"
"Winston…"
"One day. I'm giving you one day, and that's it."
"Oh, that'll be plenty, luv."
Gabriel was all set and ready to die. He'd never been more certain of something in his life.
This officially marked his fourth all-nighter of the week. He'd gone for a little more than a week and a half on no sleep whatsoever and been fresh as a damn daisy when desperate times had called for it, but the work involved with these particular bouts of vigilance had been anything but exciting. Their last operation hadn't gone unnoticed, and he'd been cleaning up what he could as the board slowly closed their hands around his throat. It would be another two nights of no sleep at least just to ensure they wouldn't gleefully apply pressure.
The canteen had been dark and silent when he'd entered, but the buzzing that had started the moment he'd switched on the lights overhead was already beginning to grate on his nerves. The upper cabinet opened with its telltale creak, and Gabriel stared blankly at its contents. They were almost out of coffee again. Not that it mattered much to him, really. Caffeine had stopped having an effect on him even before the SEP.
In all honesty, he wasn't sure why he was here. He'd gotten up from the armchair he'd been working from when the clock in his room had chimed three in the morning, and the next he'd known, he'd found himself in the mess hall. A simple change of scenery might have been what he'd been looking for.
Or an excuse to blow off the bigshots in his own private up yours as he made them wait for their results.
Definitely the scenery.
There were boxes of tea bags and loose leaf ingredients beside the nearly empty coffee can, and he rose an eyebrow, shifting the mess about. The bags tended to multiply whenever the Amaris rolled back into town. He hated the taste of them himself, but if the drink was warm, he supposed it would be fine for now. Black, green, the hell is this one…
The scrape of a stool on the tile behind him was louder than it rightly should have been in the quiet.
There was a time when his first instinct would have been to spin and face the sound. Now, he didn't so much as twitch. He didn't turn, didn't blink. Instead, he continued to rummage, his eyes firmly ahead. But despite the lack of reaction, his senses were on high alert, every nerve in his body jolting with energy at the noise. Seven feet back, obstruction, ten stools, third from the left, shifted an inch, maybe two-
It wasn't until it dragged against the floor again that he grunted an acknowledgement. "You're past curfew," came the short reprimand, "and by the sound of it, you know it." Not that I give a damn.
Silence.
And then, a longer, louder scrape of the chair on the tile, the noise grating at every fibre of his body. Gabriel's eyes rolled skywards as he turned around, a scathing rebuke already on his tongue-
-but it died as his eyes narrowed slowly, his mouth closing.
There was nobody else in the room with him. He'd switched on the overhead canlights alongside the bright CFL when he'd entered at some point, and while they didn't light the whole area, he could see better than most to begin with. The room was empty, and aside from a single stool having shifted significantly out of its order, there were no signs of disturbance. The canteen didn't exactly offer many hiding spots. There was no way he'd missed someone leaving, either.
But there was nobody there.
He lost count of how many seconds he surveyed the empty room, his stance relaxed and the empty mug in his hand. There was nothing but the ticking of the clock for several long heartbeats.
He'd just begun to turn back to the cabinet when it happened again.
The stool scraped harshly across the floor in one quick burst, the legs catching on the edge of the counter and tipping the chair to its side in a horrendously loud clatter. It lay between Gabriel and the door now.
The commander had barely crouched at the sudden movement, body jolting into defensive mode at the noise. But now, he simply stared at the downed stool, the mug still in his hand and the room just as empty as it had been when he'd last checked. And re-checked. And checked again, for that matter.
It took less time to break his eyes away from the object this time.
Now, they sought out a different cabinet as he shut the door on the tea bags quietly. Mug still in hand, he stepped over the toppled chair to open the door he'd searched for, reaching high overhead and shifting a significant amount of unlabeled boxes to the side. A bottle he'd confiscated from Captain Briggs' personal collection emerged, and he blandly read over the label.
It did about as much as caffeine, but under the circumstances, he really didn't give a shit.
His eyes did not shift from the task as he filled half of the mug, the bottle clinking lightly on the edge of the old porcelain. But when he finished the half-pour, he paused, his eyes tracing back to the downed chair.
Gabriel left the canteen with the stool on the ground and straight bourbon practically spilling over the mug's brim.
"I don't-"
"I'm telling you, if he didn't leave when he did, I'd have given myself away right then and there, I couldn't stand it-"
"He couldn't have not expressed something."
"Swear on my honorable word, he didn't give a rat's arse."
"…"
"…I reckon we might want to be a bit more worried about that, don't you?"
"I'm sure he's just… preoccupied."
Reinhardt was used to early snow. It wasn't uncommon in his corner of the world, after all. But all the same, the flurry that had passed in the night had taken most of the base (himself included) by surprise. It wouldn't be enough to call for an early winter, but it certainly shifted the idea of autumn further from their heads despite the three long weeks left in October. If another round of gusts passed through again, the last of the golden leaves on the trees surrounding them would be swept away entirely, shattering the image altogether.
He wiped his brow with the back of his hand, the heat from his face strong enough to be felt several inches away from it. It was cold, certainly. But the effort it took to shovel and salt the paths around the outer walls of the building was more than enough to have him blazing like a furnace. He'd volunteered to undertake the task earlier in the morning, and despite the shocked glances from the cadets usually in charge of such mundane chores, they'd agreed to his services.
In all honesty, he was bored out of his skull.
The task, tedious as it might have been, was just something to fill the hours with now. They hadn't sent him out for weeks after the fiasco that had thrown his knee out in Greece, and there was only so much "gentle" training you could do before cabin fever took hold.
He planted the broad shovel in the ground, straightening to survey his work. He'd gotten the bulk of the pathways cleared (it had taken an awful lot of reassurance on his part that the panicking cadets in charge of said pathways were not slacking off, he was just quick to get a job done, he promised), and now found himself beside the secluded rose garden many of the higher officers spent their afternoons in when springtime rolled around. It was empty, now, the fountain in the center bubbling gently from the water pouring down the length of a stone woman's gown. The slow trickle of water was causing the small chunks of ice inside the basin to bob about lazily. Her arms were outstretched and glistening from frost, a gentle, loving smile on her face, the offering of peace readable from miles away.
Reinhardt was quite fond of it.
He'd been told it was modelled after a girl from Zurich. She'd assisted in the initial raising of funds to promote Overwatch's potential, back in the early days when the strikeforce had been but a mere concept. He never was told what had become of her in the end, but he had an inkling. There was a quiet sadness to her eyes that didn't quite fit the smile. The heat had cooled on his own face as he'd watched the empty garden, and he shook himself slightly, ignoring the twinge in his knee as the effort of the morning made itself known. Admiring the gardens wasn't getting the paths any clearer, and he dutifully reached for his shovel to pick back up where he'd left off.
His hand grasped air.
Turning with a frown, his eyes scanned the ground around him. He'd just had it. It must have fallen when he'd been distracted, then-
There was nothing. The shovel had simply up and disappeared. Furrowing his brow, Reinhardt slowly levelled his surroundings with a look. He had just put it there. He knew he had. He may have been aging, but he wasn't daft.
Whatever further investigation he was about to commit came to a grinding halt the second he heard footsteps from around the corner of the building behind him. He turned, eyes narrowed and brimming with suspicion as the crunch of the footsteps stopped just out of sight.
"Hello?"
His call was met with silence, and he frowned, the sweat on his brow beading uncomfortably in the chill. Maybe they'd seen where the shovel had fallen and were picking it up-
The footsteps began again without warning then, and Reinhardt stared diligently at the edge of the building.
Nobody emerged.
And yet the footsteps continued.
Incredulous, Reinhardt backed away a step, eyes trained on the snow in utter disbelief. There was nobody to be seen, but there, plain as day, were footprints. The imprints appeared one after the other, heading slowly in the direction of the gardens, the gentle crunch underfoot the only sound to be heard over the bubbling of water. They slowed further about halfway to the fountain, and then stopped entirely, as if their owner was gazing up at the woman in stone.
The next pair to appear were facing Reinhardt head-on.
There was sweat on his neck and a chill in his spine for an entirely different reason now, but he stayed where he was, staring down something that well and couldn't be stared down. He'd been working too hard. The sunlight on the snow was playing tricks, surely. Or a prank, even. In poor taste, but it was possible-
But then the steps began moving towards him, faster now than before.
Shovel and knee be damned, Reinhardt was back inside and facing several incredibly confused cadets before he'd completely made up his mind.
"You gave him back the shovel, right?"
"Well, I would've if he'd stuck around. Didn't exactly expect him to run for it."
"He has a… an unfortunate history with the idea of spirits, you know."
"Wish you'd told me that sooner."
"I didn't know he was on your list for the day."
"When you say 'unfortunate,' you-"
"Seeing 'ghosts' isn't always an experience to be afraid of. Sometimes the urge to run from something you can't see is driven by something harder to process than fear."
"I… don't follow."
"There's a lot of ways to experience regret, Lena."
-which brings about the question at hand: if not us, who else? How many are needlessly left to fl-
"Dr. Ziegler-"
Angela's fingers stilled over the keyboard. She didn't bother to look up before her eyes slowly shut.
"-I hate to interrupt, but I gotta ask. Have you seen-"
"Oh, good Lord."
"…well, no, but if you've seen him around too, let me know what he's been up to lately."
Angela had pinched the bridge of her nose before Jesse could finish the sentence, willing the headache she felt coming on to ease as her reading glasses inched up her face. They fell back into place easily as she lowered her hand, her eyes not bothering to go back to the screens on her desk. Instead, they pinned the man in her doorway with a short look.
"That's eighteen of you now," she said, voice tinged in disbelief, "eighteen."
For his due credit, McCree actually appeared confused at that. Granted, he seemed confused by most things these days. She couldn't say she blamed him. Blackwatch had begun to go topsy turvy on all of them. She could only imagine what sorts of things he'd been forced to figure out in the thick of the mess.
"I, uh," he started slowly, "Eighteen-?"
"Something's missing."
He leaned against the doorframe, his weight shifting awkwardly. "Well, yeah, but that-"
"That's eighteen of you that have come to me about something missing today," she interrupted, her readers finding their way off of her face as she folded them neatly onto the desk. It was true. She had no idea what it was about her that was currently attracting every agent that seemed to be losing something. And they weren't just cadets seeking her out. Ana's cowl, gone from her dresser. Jack's spare coat took an unplanned vacation to Lord only knew where, but why he'd thought to ask her, she'd never rightly know. Reinhardt could have sworn he'd left his glasses on his bed frame, and if he'd been slightly pale when he'd asked after them during his physical therapy session, he'd denied anything of the matter. She'd hesitantly offered him her own readers after realizing he'd expected her to know what had happened to them.
It was bizarre. And, quite frankly, beginning to get on her last nerve.
When Jesse made no move to reply, she crossed her arms on the edge desk, leaning forward as she spoke. "I appreciate… whatever thought you all seem to have for my organizational talents, but I assure you, I am not the one to be bringing all of this to."
He scratched at his neck sheepishly, not quite meeting her eye.
"It… ain't so much that I'm here for the thing that's missin'," he finally said, the words oddly forced, "and I get the feelin' it's the same for whoever else came this way. It's more the…"
Angela waited patiently for more, but when it was clear Jesse was struggling to find the right words, she uncrossed her arms and caught his eye firmly. "I have three requests to draft on private projects that will cost more than we were worth in our prime, Jesse. Either tell me why you're here or let me work, please."
His shoulders rose and fell heavily as the breath left him in a rush. His wandering stare found the ceiling, and he muttered something under his breath before finally locking eyes with her.
"Well, Angie, it's the fact that my damn brain might be fried."
She was quiet for a moment after that little tidbit. It wasn't a long moment.
"And here I thought that went without saying."
Jesse shot her a look at her blasé reply, not bothering to so much as acknowledge the attempt at humor. "Look, it's not just me, the others'a'been-"
Angela would have chalked the abrupt pause up to another moment of vocabular indecision on Jesse's part, but a split second after he froze, she heard it too.
Someone in the hallway was screaming.
It wasn't the typical screams they knew too well. There was no pain, no rage, nothing remotely fitting of a soldier of their calabre. Angela knew those kinds of screams like she knew her own voice. She'd heard them in her dreams too many times to count. Back when she did dream, anyways.
There was nothing in this particular scream but sheer, stone-cold terror.
Jesse was out the door before Angela could round the desk herself, but she was hot on his heels as he barrelled along. It didn't take long to find the source. If the scream hadn't still been going, the line of officers sticking their heads out of their doors would have been a sign enough on its own. The shriek had come from the elevator bank, and Jesse and Angela rounded the corner alongside four other higher officers at a run.
The scene was a perculiar one at best.
The cadet sprawled on the floor of the corridor was beyond terrified. She was scooting backwards across the tile, hands scrabbling as she pushed herself away from whatever it was that had frightened her to the point of physically bowling her over. The cluster of officers alongside Jesse and Angela seemed to take notice of the source just about when they did as well.
Jack's missing coat was dangling in the open air in front of the open elevator at the end of the hall.
There was nothing holding it up that Angela could see, and as she watched, the more she noticed. A pair of glasses, floating about face-height. Jesse's hat, tilted back and resting on virtually nothing in the air. The arm of the coat lifted, pointing distinctly at the downed cadet, drawing a renewed round of furious scrambling from the girl. The coat drifted backwards as it did so, floating easily into the elevator along with the hat and glasses, the arm outstretched and drifting silently as if on air itself.
Sergeant Breckenreid's pistol was drawn and fired just a second too late as the doors shut on the impossibility with a pleasant ding.
It took far too long for Angela to shake herself out of her initial surprise, but she was crouching beside the trembling girl before the rest of the hallway had even reacted to the sergeant's gunshot. There was noise now ("the hell was that-!"), surrounding them as the hallway descended into chaos ("get someone on each floor, now! Quickly-"), but Angela hushed the cadet quietly as she gently gripped her wrist, the racing pulse at her fingertips not slowing in the least as she muttered calming words.
When her eyes rose, they found Jesse, unmoved in the middle of the mess and his eyes still solidly on the elevator. The moment he felt hers on him, however, he shifted his gaze to her face. The nonchalant chuckle he gave her wasn't meant to waver, but she was certain tit did all the same.
"Good news, doc."
Angela raised a brow at him, and he cleared his throat as he tapped a finger to his head.
"Brain ain't fried."
"You did what?"
Winston was standing, the board he'd bumped off the desk at his abrupt movement rattling on the floor. He'd been running specs on a new security system with Athena for most of the afternoon, but she'd gone silent the moment the shot had been fired. He'd been up and ready to bolt for the sound, but she'd assured him seconds after that it had been a mistaken discharge. She hadn't had time to inform him just what that meant before Lena had zipped in and slammed a hand on the chronal accelerator, instantly making herself tangible once more, the frazzled expression on her face instantly answering Winston's question. Reinhardt's glasses were still set askew on her nose, and Jack's coat had been tucked haphazardly under her arm alongside Jesse's hat, and-
"In my defense, luv, I didn't think they'd shoot at-"
"That's the one floor they're guarenteed to shoot! Lena, what were you thinking?"
"It's a bit of fun, is all! A few scares for some laughs later, but that one just-"
Winston had already taken the coat from her, folding it onto his worktable as he motioned for her to sit down, a hand grasping for the tools he'd used earlier that morning.
"I'm calling it."
Lena hesitated a moment too long for his liking, but ultimately sighed, flopping into the seat across from him dramatically.
"I hate to say it, but I think that's fair, big guy."
"You get to inform them of what really happened up there when we're done."
"What-"
"Do you really want them running around chasing an intruder that doesn't exist? One they think they can't even see?"
"…I mean-"
"That did not," Winston interrupted, twisting the faceplate off of the accelerator as he spoke, "call for an answer."
Heads up as well, I'm uploading another chapter of my zombie-roadtrip-au "Hitchhikers" in the spooky spirit. If you're looking for more Halloween-esque hijinks, head on over that way! And again, requests are still open!
