Fuck am I tired... Entire body hurts like hell... Probably just lay here for a while... Someone's got my hand... Angel... Is she alright?... Is her neck alright from Reyes' big meaty claws?... Looks like she's been crying... Should I say something?...
"Are there any more cans left?" Came a gravelly voice from the bed. Mercy looked up in surprise at her lover.
"Mein god. I wasn't sure you would wake up!" Mercy cried as she hugged her lover.
"Are you alright?" The Sniper's gravelly voice asked softly as he brought his hand to the side of her face.
"I'm much better now." She said, fresh tears streaming down her smiling face. "You saved lots of lives, did you know that? Mine included."
"Aaaand, it was fun as hell moving that quick." He said with a smile, that slowly disappeared when he saw his lover's smile leave her face. "What?"
"You almost killed yourself. I had hoped one can would bring you up back to your normal self, but you downed four, and as a result, were somehow capable of moving fast enough to be typically impossible. Even Lena couldn't keep up with you." She said as she began pacing in the room.
"Lena?"
"Tracer. In the brief time you were rushing around, you fired seventy three rounds of fourty four caliber ammunition, all from a revolver. With video evidence, the average time you spent reloading was a shocking one and a half seconds. The empty shells had barely hit the floor before you were ready to fire again. Not to mention your accuracy! It is unheard of for someone to headshot every single one of their targets and never miss like you did!"
"Can I get a copy of the footage? I want to put it on the internet." He croaked out with a smile
"Very funny. Add all of that to the damage you did to your body..." She said before catching herself. She looked to her lover who had quickly replaced his grin with a grim look on his face.
"How bad is it?" She stood there silently, hands falling to her side's and tears starting to trail down her cheeks. "Angel, how bad?"
"...Even with my medical abilities, you may never walk again. Maybe with extensive surgeries and years of therapy..."
"Greeaaat... Anything else?"
"There's no guarantee that you could stay on your feet even for more than a few minutes at a time after the therapy."
"Fuuuuck." He groaned. His fiancee returning to his side and holding his hand.
"Sweetheart, there are other options..."
"Yeah, I could lop off my limbs and reattach parts from a bastion in their places."
"It probably wouldn't work with those parts per-say, but yes, cybernetic replacements are an option. It worked for Genji, McCree, and Torbjörn. There are other options too, but some are risky."
"Riskier than downing four cans of energy drink and singlehandedly killing an army?" He said with a smirk.
"Not funny. You could've died." She said frowning.
"You could've too." He replied.
"I'm still in practice for dealing with situations like that, you were stuck in a sluggish state with brain damage."
"Until the magic potion came into play and allowed me to save almost everyone's lives."
"More like magic poison. The chemical that you had forced into your system altered you so much that your body was capable of adapting to most situations, notably that one."
"Were you able to fix me?"
"For the most part, yes. However, the damage you did to yourself was beyond belief."
"What would happen if I drank another can?"
"Right now? You would likely get an energy boost, but you have no way to utilize it. If you tried to walk, you would almost certainly collapse."
"So I'm fucked..."
"For the time being... yes. But you have many people here, myself included, who owe you their lives."
"Mmm..." He said as he looked at his hands. How much did he give up for ten minutes of fun?
"Hey... This isn't a decision you have to make quickly, but you have all the support in the world for what choice you do make."
They sat there quietly for a long while, time dragging on, silence unending... Until the door opened revealing McCree walking in.
"Hey, Boss." John said as he saw his oldest friend from the corner of his eye, clearing startling him.
"You're awake!"
"Nope, we all died. This is hell. We can never leave and the food will continually get worse."
"Oh haha. You had us all worried. With as long as you've been out..." He trailed off as he saw Mercy putting her head in her hands. "What?"
"I think he's had enough bad news for one day..." She said to the Cowboy.
"Might as well tell me, I'll find out one way or another... What's it been? A few days? A week or two?"
"Sweetheart, It's been two months."
"Did I miss out on anything important?"
"Well, Sombra escaped shortly after you caught her." McCree said.
"The chick in the purple coat?"
"Yeah, her. We really need to catch you up on who's who."
"I know who one of them is. That shadowy guy is Reyes."
"Yeah, he's an even bigger pain in the ass now."
"His loyalty sure went out the window..."
"Alright you two, John needs to eat something." Mercy interrupted. "And I'll need your help getting him into the wheelchair." She said as she got up and opened the closet revealing a collapsible wheelchair that she pulled out and unfolded next to his bed.
"Wait... I need to try to do it myself."
"Sweetheart, I..."
"Let him try." McCree interrupted. The pair watched as the young man managed to get the covers off of himself, his body mostly upright, and lifted himself into the chair. He frowned when he realized how useless his legs truly were, but now knew his arms could eventually be fine.
"Ta-fucking-da." He said at his lover's and friend, both of them smiling widely. "Now where are my pants?" He said, clearly displeased at being stuck in the medical gown.
"Let me grab them, sweetheart." Mercy said as she went for the dresser at the end of the room, not noticing McCree walking out, not wanting to see anything he didn't need to.
A short while later, Mercy was wheeling her fiancee towards the cafeteria. He sat there, clearly unhappy that he needed so much help to do simple tasks.
"Remind me to have you lop my legs of at the hip so I can work on building a pair that will actually work."
"Are you being serious, or sarcastic." She asked dryly. "That isn't something to joke about right now.
"I'm being dead serious. I will not be useless while others take care of me if I have a say in the matter."
"Alright. We'll have to talk about this later, we're here." She said as she pushed the doors to the cafeteria open, and wheeled him in.
Luckily, the cafeteria was mostly empty with a few people sitting and eating or talking. A small group was Torbjörn, Reinhardt, and Brigitte, the latter of whom was the first to notice the lovers entering the room, and waved them over.
When Mercy finished wheeling her lover over, Brigitte was the first to speak. "Are you alright?.
"I'll be fine. Just gonna sit here and be a crotchety old guy like I should be."
"You're thirty five..." Mercy said dryly.
"I've been raking in the miles. That's what matters.
"You are taking risks that you can't afford." Reinhardt said looking at the sniper.
"This coming from the expert in that area?" Came the unexpected response, surprising all but Reinhardt.
"True enough, but I learned better, the hard way, as I believe you will as well, if you haven't already..." He noticed a slight twitch in the sniper. "I thought so... So how bad is it?"
"*sigh*... Well my legs are fucked... But that's the cost of saving lives, ain't it?" He asked the older members, both giving grim nods. The group quickly quieted down as they sat in thought, each remembering past battles and friends lost. The silence was broken however when Mercy set a tray of food in front of her fiancee, and another in front of herself.
"Reinhardt, Torbjörn, why don't you inform John on what he's missed?" She said, clearly wanting to push the mood elsewhere.
"Huh? Sure." Torbjörn said, as he came back to reality. "You saw the bastion unit when you saved my ass, right? Well, it seems to have developed a form of artificial Intelligence. Not quite as advanced, but still impressive."
"Where is it anyway?"
"Out in the woods with a bird that follows it around."
"Weird. And you? Brigitte, right?"
"Yes."
"You're Torbjörn's youngest right?" He asked, receiving a nod from the young woman. "You've got a suit of armor and were fighting beside Reinhardt. You join up as his squire?"
"I... Yes. How did you know?"
"Girl, by the time you were born, I had more combat experience than most people on earth... Granted a good chunk of it was running with the Deadlock gang... But still... At that point Reinhardt had earned the title of legend and outclassed me by dozens of times in combat experience. I spent a good many years clearing the way for, and protecting both him, and other badasses to lay waste to the enemy, be they omnics or human. Bit of a perk being a sniper, by the way, is being far from the action while still leaving a mark on the field of combat."
"Wow, odd that neither of these two mentioned you at all." She said, eyeing her father and her mentor.
"Hear about the bomb threat in Boston a decade ago?" he asked, getting a nod in return. "That was me who delt with it. And it did not turn out well."
"You're here, aren't you?"
"I almost wasn't. I was underwater for a decade or so..."
"Twelve years, one month and eighteen days." Mercy interrupted.
"Right, and was insanely lucky I didn't just drown when the bomb went off."
"From what I could tell, you were stuck in a form of hibernation, similar to the cryogenic stasis we sometimes use."
"Right, and even after that, I was barely conscious, and could barely think... Until I downed an energy drink or four and destroyed my legs saving everyone's lives."
"Something you had no business trying to do in the condition you were in..." Mercy said with a frown.
"Was I supposed to stand idly by with my thumb up my ass and let good people die?"
"You could've died!"
"Dozens of others, including you might've had I not helped!"
"ENOUGH!" Reinhardt yelled as he slammed his fist down onto the table, silencing the entire room. "Angela: he is not a child, he will make his own decisions and they will not always be to your liking."
"But..." She tried to say in her defense.
"Enough! And as for you," he said as he turned to the wheelchair bound sniper. "You will show her some respect when it comes to your health. Remember that she was the one one who kept you alive after you pulled that stunt."
"Yes sir." He said, brow furrowed, but accepting the advice from the weathered warrior.
"Good. I will hear no more of this fighting. What's done is done." He said as he got up from his seat. "Lives were saved, decisions were made, and the consequences dispensed."
--Several hours later, in the motor pool--
John sat at a table, working on the framework for his replacement legs. For the first time in his life, he was glad he had some distance between himself and his lover. Too much tension had built up between the two, and he was worried that it might spark something that he shuddered at the thought of... He looked around and saw Torbjörn working on what looked like a new piece of weaponry, his daughter working on her and her mentor's armor, glancing at the sniper every so often. He went back to working, quickly assembling a pair af quality limbs, though with plenty of extra space for other upgrades.
"Any idea what you're going to use the extra space for?" Brigitte's voice came from behind him.
"Not sure yet... Might go with stabilizing thrusters to help me jump higher. Definitely help with getting up and down from sniping locations."
"Not a bad idea... Hey, can I ask you another question?"
"Shoot." He said, setting his tools down.
"How did you and Mercy meet? You two aren't exactly a matching pair."
"I told you earlier how I was a sniper for the Deadlock gang, right?"
"Yes. McCree was part of that gang too, right?"
"Yeah, he was one of the two people I answered too. The other being Ashe. There were a couple other leaders, but I rarely saw them. Anyway, the Overwatch sting that captured McCree also got me. As I heard it, he was brought into Blackwatch quicker because of "Good behavior" or some shit. I had to wait a couple months, but when I was brought in, my first mission was preforming overwatch for Reyes and the rest of the group to extract Angel, the other doctors and their patients. We didn't actually meet face to face until after they retrieved me from the antenna I was shooting from."
"Was there a lot of danger involved?"
"Not really. Just a few scavengers trying to pillage and cause problems."
"Ah, I see. So when you met, was it love at first sight?"
"Kinda? I thought she was hot, and it turned out I liked her personality too, so it evolved after a while. Still not sure what she saw in me though..."
"Was it your fearlessness in the face of danger?"
"I'm a sniper, I'm as far from the danger as I can get..." He said as he got back to work on his legs. "For all I know, she liked what I looked like naked when she gave me a physical."
"R-right..." She said surprised at his response. She stood there for a while, watching him work.
"Take a picture, it'll last longer." He said with a sly smirk as he kept working.
"Erm... Sorry." She said before walking back to her work, a blush spreading over her cheeks.
--Several hours later--
Mercy walked up to John as he slept in his chair, with his pair of replacement legs laying on the table, complete and waiting to be attached. She looked over the pair, slim enough to go under clothing, but sturdy enough to take a beating. Not to mention they appeared to have a pair of small thruster systems integrated within. She couldn't help thinking he would be able to do quite well with them. She carefully pushed him back to his room, making sure not to wake him up. She couldn't help thinking that the time they spent apart after their spat was for the best, it gave them both much needed time to reflect, and though she was still mad that he kept rushing off, but she couldn't deny that it kept working out. When she got to his room, she carefully got him out out of the wheelchair, and into bed.
She walked to her own room, changed into some sleepwear, grabbed a clean set of clothes for the next day, and walked back to her fiance's room. When she got there, she set her clean clothing into a dresser, and carefully climbed into the bed with her lover, trying her best not to wake him.
"Thank you, Angel..." The sniper mumbled to her.
"You're welcome. Goodnight." She replied, giving him a quick kiss before going to sleep.
