Her mind and body, both running hot with a day's worth of raw emotion, propelled her forth.

Angela reached for the door handle to Jack's room without much of an idea what she was going to say, or even what she was going to do. Every fiber of her being was screaming in exhausted, righteous outrage for what Jack had done, and as such her capacity for pre-planning her next move was inhibited beyond walking. What she was going to say and do to the former Strike Commander would be a surprise to her.

But whatever it would be, she both feared and welcomed it.

The burning rage that rumbled in her gut and contorted her face into the furious glare she wore served a second purpose in collaring her mind; Without room to roam, there existed no possibility of cold feet freezing her in her tracks. Hesitation, she knew, had done her no good the past few weeks; If anything, it was the reason confrontation had become inevitable. The time to stop and reconsider was long gone. Now was the time to do what needed to be done.

A whisper-quiet sigh was Angela's only acknowledgement of the cruel irony.

The door flung open with a tremendous crash, accompanied by the snap of rusted metal at the hinges. Angela didn't flinch nor even pay either sound a glance, though. Her attention was focused solely ahead, at who and what shared the space she now occupied and why she was there.

She stopped briefly, but only because like the pit of Hell she had come from Jack's quarters were impenetrably dark, the only light sources being a dying incandescent bulb under a fraying shade and a tiny window, the yellow glints of which did little to penetrate the masses of black and grey. The room itself, she discovered once her eyes had adjusted enough, was still a closet by any standards, just over three times the size of the torture chamber and virtually bare save for a few meager furnishings. None of this came as a surprise; One of the most tenured stories about the former Strike Commander from the Golden Age, she recalled as her mind slipped into the open, was when he'd refused the luxurious suite meant for him at Overwatch's then shining new base in Geneva. Angela had signed onto the team a full decade after, but Torbjorn and Reinhardt both corroborated the story, summing it up with a quote they swore was said directly, mild streamlining aside, to Geneva's chief designer.


"One year, back on the farm in Indiana, spring came a lot later than usual. By the time the dairy herd started calving, the days were barely above freezing and the nights were like the dead of winter, but we couldn't wait any longer. One of them that year was a heifer we called Izzy. I'd bottle-fed her after her mom had to be put down due to sickness, so I'd always seen her as my responsibility. Right from the beginning, things went wrong. She wasn't eating and she could barely stand. Me and the vet did everything we could, but when time was up no one thought she or the baby was going to survive."

"She went into labour late one day. Because of the trouble she'd had, someone had to keep a close eye. But the thing is you have to make sure they can't see you, or they'll be too scared to calf. I gave Izzy the blanket I'd brought for myself and then spent the night in the loft, ready to go at a moment's notice. It was the first time I'd ever pulled an all-nighter, and I'd never felt more tired in my life. I stayed awake by checking that I knew what to do, and praying that I didn't have to do it. In the end, it must have amounted to something, since when I walked down to check on Izzy, she was alive and nursing a healthy little girl without a problem. I then dried my eyes, cleaned off the calf, and went back to work."

"The point is you can rework it or leave it as is, but either way I'll pass. Someone else'll use it better."


The first time the doctor had heard it was a week after joining the team, the same day a mission swelled her newly granted sick bay with casualties and the sparkle of optimism she'd gotten from the old soldier's promises and dreams was beginning to flicker. The whys and whats had been lost to the sands of time, but every patient she'd sat at the bedside of to check up on said the same things:

We'd never have made it without the commander...

The commander refused to set off until we were all on the ship...

He charged into a crossfire outnumbered a hundred to one, just to pull me to safety...

If they're gonna give out a medal to anyone, it needs to be to the commander...

He was like a guardian angel out there...

She scrunched her eyes and shook her head, but a smile curled across her lips all the same. That was how Jack had always been. One story always seemed to lead to another, then another, and then yet another before finally leading back to the man himself. Even near the end and when he'd found her in Cairo, he'd still been the same broad-shouldered, blue-eyed farmboy who'd give anything if it meant saving a life, who everyone looked up to and could count on.

Angela shook her head again and lengthened her expression into something harder. Was, she reminded herself. Past tense. Once she'd thought that sentiment couldn't kill, but it could delay and distract, two things that were not only up to the task but were just as dangerous to the hunter as to the target.

Or in this case, as the target itself.

The most trace movement in the corner of her eye stood out among the mass of shadows, immediately drawing her full attention. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled around her shirt's collar as she turned towards the source and drew closer with each minuscule step. In among the black shapes, a raw feeling twisted in her gut and her scar burned with its familiar sting. Instinctively her eyes swiveled, searching for the monster that trauma and instinct told her was present, until at last she came to a stop as she reached the movement's origin point, a plastic chair between the bed and the dresser.

"Jack," she said, as firm as her profession had taught her to be. "we need to talk."

The unmasked figure that stood up and stepped into the faint light made Angela gasp. Rationality called it Jack, while spur-of-the-moment fear called it Reyes.

Whatever it was, both sides agreed, it wasn't human.

Jack's figure still stood tall, but the strapping muscle of youth had thinned to a gaunt, corpse-like build, with wiry muscles clinging tight to old bones. The square jaw that had earned the description of 'a Norman Rockwell painting come to life' had faded to a sallow, dead colour and was lined by a scraggly beard, both bent to a point by a bitter frown. The scars across his face from before had gained new company since, some of which ran so deep and so rotten that Angela could see bare, protruding cheekbones under a thin layer of toxic green flesh. Likewise could be found across his arms and chest, without his jacket to conceal them.

But it was his eyes, most of all, that made her take a step back as her heart skipped a beat. Genji had once said that the eyes were the gateway to the soul, and not so long ago Jack's had been a brilliant sky-blue, their gaze steely but guileless. What she saw now couldn't have been more different; Sunken deep into their sockets, the only life to be found were the thin streaks of blood red that ran like bolts of lightning from where the pupils had to have been. But there was no telling, not when his eyes themselves, even under the light, were black as coal. The most logical reason, she knew, was that it was a side effect of Moira's biotic perversions, but the sight triggered a simpler, more frightening explanation.

She had looked through the gateway, and found nothing.

"What is it?" he rasped blankly. "You done making that stuff?"

Angela gulped her heart back down into her chest and refocused herself. "That's not what I want to talk about," she replied.

He tilted his gaze derisively away from her. "I know. From in here, I can hear everything. Every step, every sound. Nothing goes unnoticed."

"Then why stay in here?" she asked. From there, her tone rose to a level that indicated a challenge. "Why not come out and see what you've done?"

The silence that followed was as long as it was deafening, only broken by a seething growl through Jack's teeth as he began to pace the room while Angela watched, waiting for a response with growing incredulity.

Jack mulled over a darkened section of the farthest wall as he spoke. "Back in Oasis, you hesitated." He turned to look over another wall, similarly shaded. "I hid Fio because I didn't trust you, but I didn't stop you because I wanted to give you a chance to prove you'd changed."

A breath wheezed out through Angela's mouth as a familiar chill ran down her spine. The words to use to describe the cocktail of emotions swirling inside her failed to show, but the fury that boiled her feelings soon spat out a few. "I'm not a murderer. I-"

"And that's just it," Jack interrupted, looking over his shoulder at her with his obsidian doll's eyes. "We want the same thing, but you don't understand what that means." He gestured to the door frame, where a switch just peeked out from the farthest reach of the darkness. "Turn it on."

The question of what fresh horror awaited delayed her actions until Jack repeated his command with greater force, jolting her into action. With the flick of a finger, the switch activated two new, vivid LED lights, based at the bottom of Jack's walls of interest that peeled back the shadowy veil, answering her questions.

It was even worse than she'd feared.

The far wall held a rack of weapons, arranged in a lethal pyramid of grenades, huge serrated knives, and gleaming pistols, crowned at the top by his pulse rifle. The near one showed a map, lined from wall to ceiling with duct tape. On the continents, thumb tacks provided the support around which strands of red yarn were wound tightly and stretched to the next one, while also skewering apiece a fading Polaroid picture. Together they created a combination of names and places that rung a fearful bell to Angela; Oasis, Venice, Arizona, Monaco, Cairo, Gibraltar, Dorado, Paris. Tacked over them too were faces, some marked with a red X such as Moira, others with a question mark, others still with a circle like Reyes and Doomfist.

And Fio, and McCree, and even more...

Words, this time, were nowhere to be found. Jack, however, seemed to preempt what she was thinking.

"Everything," he snarled as his arms stretched out and raised over his head. "Every place and every person that Talon's infected. We're both soldiers now, but in a sense we're doing the same work you did before." He looked over her way, making her flinch again as a mangled, manic grin crossed his face. "We're cutting out a cancer, you and I. Fio was the first step, and because of you, Moira was the second and Reyes will be the third soon enough. Because of you, we both have the power to carve a path through Talon and everyone else who stands in our way."

Angela's jaw dropped like a stone and her eyes went wide. Though her breath laboured and the chill running down her spine stiffened her joints, her mind ran swiftly back to two days that had suddenly become intrinsically linked to what transpired now.

So," Jack asked as he went her way on silent footsteps. "now do you understand?"

Angela turned her one shoulder in, hoping to hide the shaking fist that her other hand balled into. Her mouth filled with the sour taste of hateful venom as she spoke. "Yes. I understand perfectly."

The stare Jack sent her way looked like death itself. There was no sadism to it, or at least none directed towards her. She saw what there was when he lowered his head and snorted out a breath like an angry bull, his nostrils flaring with a rage she had come to know so intimately. "I can't do this without you," he whispered.

Something snapped inside Angela right then. The volume of her tone shot upward and her own anger began to boil over. "Do what?" she demanded. "Kill more children?!"

Jack stayed quiet, but his words were like stone. "Acceptable losses. Fio wouldn't talk, so she paid the price."

"She retired years ago! Why did you involve her?"

"She pulled them out of Venice. That's where it all began." He paced towards the gun racks like a caged animal, drawing a knife off it and running his wiry fingers along the smooth edge. "I should have just killed them all, right then," He plunged the knife into the map and through the wall, right on top of Reaper's picture. "and right THERE!"

"And then what?" she shouted, following him to look him straight in his dead eyes. "After they were dead, who would be next?"

"The world's full of people who need killing."

"Is it, or can you not tell the difference?"

"There are no innocents!" Jack finally snapped back. "I thought you'd learned that when Reyes slaughtered your precious clinic."

The glare Angela sent was daggers into his cold heart. "How dare you," she spat.

"How dare me?! How dare you!" He pressed his index finger down on her collarbone before she swiped it away with a snarl.

Baring his teeth like a mad dog, he ripped out the knife from the wall and raised its point to his right hand, slicing across it in a single, slow motion before putting the blade in its scabbard. Angela felt a grim, odd mix of surprise and relief when she saw he could still bleed red.
"I gave everything to make the world a better place, and for what?" he shouted. "Just to see that for twenty years. For TWENTY. GODDAMN. YEARS, I could have pulled the trigger, but when I needed to it wasn't even loaded!"

Following where his head and body turned rather than his eyes, Angela watched Jack return to the map and produce a cigarette lighter, even though she never known him to smoke.
"But now," he growled, tracing his bloody hand across the pictures. "Now we have a chance. It can't just end with Reyes or Doomfist, no. They all need to go down. We'll take everything they have left," Flicking open the lighter, he held it at the edge of the map, letting the flame lick the edges before taking root and spreading across. In moments the map was rendered to ash, and the light of the simmering embers intertwined with the LEDs across his gnarled face, darkening the shadows and illuminating the twisted grin that warped them further. "and burn it all to a crisp."

As she blinked heavily to stifle the tears that welled up, Angela cursed under her breath for feeling a way she'd hoped never to feel again. "Do you know who you sound like?"

"Someone who's had enough!" he barked, smashing his clenched fist against the ashen wall. "Someone who wants to be able to look at themselves in the mirror again!"

The only sound in the room was the mental clinking of the penny dropping in Angela's head. "Then we find another way," she pleaded. "There's always one. We could let it end. We could go to-"

"Where?" Jack challenged. "If you've got an idea, spit it out."

Though she'd seen the response coming from a mile away, finding a response somehow remained hard, if only because the first thing that came to mind was the last thing she wanted to say.

But she didn't need to when Jack caught on. She could practically see his own penny dropping as he pushed himself off the wall, laughing through a thin, wide, heartless smile. "That's what I thought," he snarled jeeringly. "Pathetic. They'd never take you back anyways, not after you abandoned them again."

Angela drooped her shoulders and stared at the floor in lieu of words as Jack approached her again.
"You've always thought the world's something you can change by 'saving lives'," he said, his gruff voice scratching like sandpaper. "and all that's come from it is pain and death. So stitch up your bleeding heart for once and learn the damn facts of life."

She covered her eyes with a hand over her temples, hiding the daggers she sent.

Jack leaned in closer as he spoke until she could smell his sulfuric breath. "It's a dark, lonely road for soldiers like us, and once you start down it there's no going back."

I'm not like you, she mouthed in more than one direction.

"The moment you start saying there are lines you won't cross is the moment you lose. Ana was always like that, and so was the rest of Overwatch, but you should have known better." Jack traced a finger under her eye, finding the scar and following it as far as it could go. "You created Reyes when you could have killed him, but no. You hesitated, like you always do."

Angela's shoulders heaved more and more with each breath.

"So here's the deal." He grabbed her hair and pulled, forcing her to look up and giving him a good look at her own eyes, watery and bloodshot as they were. "We're hunting down Reyes tonight, so the next time you get the chance to pull the trigger, you do it. Or torture and murder will be the least of your problems-"

The slap came out of nowhere as the incandescent bulb shattered; The blur of a hand, a reeling face, and the tinkling of glass shards falling and it was gone. Angela's jaw quivered as her teeth gritted and her posture grew fearless, while Jack's black eyes widened in shock as he processed the incredulity. The nerve that she had to strike him. Of all people, him!

In an unbroken series of motions, Jack's fist balled into an iron grip and repaid twice what Angela was owed for her strike, sending her to the ground with a crunch and a thud as a stream of blood came out from her nose, before he swept around the other side of the bed and raised the pulse rifle with lethal intent.

If Angela was supposed to be intimidated by staring down the barrel through narrowed eyes, there was too much coursing inside her veins to feel it. Too much venom swirling in her mouth, too much anger in her glare.

And yet, something else entirely stirred in her heart, then spread to her eyes and then to the rest of her face. The words that provided accompaniment almost bewildered herself as she uttered them. "What happened to you?"

The silent moment shared between them was as palpable as it was terrifying. Jack's black stare bore down on the doctor, his trigger finger itching to curl tight, and yet Angela barely moved where she sat. The instinct to fight or fly should have been at its zenith, but the only voluntary muscle that moved was that which closed her eyes, the signal of a resignation she should never have even considered.

Unless...

"Don't waste your mercy," he seethed. "Someone else'll use it better."

A slew of shots rang out, making a sharp, wet impact with their target. The smell of burnt pulse charges hung in Angela's nose, something she almost didn't think of until she realized that she could still smell, let alone think, in the first place. She opened her eyes to see the smoking muzzle pointed just above her head, out beyond the doorway. Her eyes, though, weren't the first thing to follow the path the bullets took.

Her ears picked up on the thump of a corpse on the floor first.

Turning around, her worst fears were confirmed as Fio's body lay twisted like a ragdoll, with two smoldering holes in her chest and one through her head that turned the afghan a soaking crimson. "No," she rasped through an empty breath as she crawled towards the corpse and cradled it powerlessly. "No," she repeated, and with each repetition the word grew louder and more hysterical it became until she buried her head against Fio's icy, blood-soaked chest, screaming through muffled sobs.

Even now, though, Jack's callous voice was unavoidable as he stepped over them. "We move out tonight. I'll secure the halls while you pull yourself together and get this place ready to burn down. Oh, and Angela?"

For the shortest, most desolate moment of her life, the doctor stared up, not having any clue of what he wanted to say.

He carried the truest sincerity she'd seen since they'd first met. "Thank you. For everything."

As the words lingered, he disappeared behind a shut door.