"So this is the Commander's ex? Huh, man's got good taste. Up and at 'em, love. Your presence has been requested." There was the voice, then a loud banging outside your cell as the lights blinked on, drowning you in white fluorescent lights.

Blinking in the brightness, you looked up to see four Talon soldiers, each wearing tactical gear, standing outside your cell. They all had their own weapons out and ready, as if you were going to leap at them through the plasma barrier. You couldn't help but smirk a bit at that. Four soldiers afraid of one little you. Damn, Morrigan must have been a beast.

"Yeah? And if I refuse?" you asked, sitting up and gently rubbing your bleary eyes.

One of the soldiers laughed, shaking his head. "We've orders to bring you in, conscious or unconscious. You pick, sweetheart."

You frowned. "Fine, I won't make your life hell, on one condition. No pet names. Only two men have permission to call me sweetheart, and you're not one of them."

Another one of the soldiers laughed. They were smaller in stature, more like you, but built thicker. "Oh, you hear that, Barsa? She's got a bit of a bark to her."

"My bite's worse," you said dryly, pushing yourself off the bed. "You wanna come here and find out?"

"Maybe another time, love. I love my women feisty," the first soldier, Barsa, replied, holding up his wrist and disarming the barrier. He stepped inside the cell, but stayed near the door as the other three made their way in, one approaching you with a pair of cuffs. "Turn around, hands behind your back. Just like that, poppet. For all that bluster, you really are obedient, aren't you?"

"I'll castrate you," you snarled at him, honestly thinking about putting up a fight if only to smash his teeth in. No, no that wasn't you talking. This anger wasn't you.

Barsa merely laughed, gesturing towards the door with his gun. "Come on, get a move on. I'm gonna watch her rear."

The men laughed and, despite all the effort you put into staying there, you lunged. You didn't make it far before you were yanked back by the chains on your wrists, not that it mattered because you didn't have a plan of attack, but it was satisfying to watch Barsa quickly lift his weapon in surprise. You chuckled at the sight before you grunted as the soldier behind you drove the butt of his gun into the backs of your knees, bringing you down to the ground. A weapon cracked against your face, pain radiating from your jaw. You could already taste the blood on your tongue.

You grinned, showing off a bloody smile. The pain was already fading quickly. "I thought you'd like that, sir," you said, mocking politeness, "seeing as you like your women feisty and all that."

"Think you're real funny, do you?" he asked, and you could hear the glare, the tremble in his voice. You had scared him. He hadn't expected you to actually retaliate.

"Oh, I think I'm hilarious. I think you're scared, a stór," you said lowly, tilting your head as you waited for him to hit you again. You didn't know why you were finding it fun to egg him on like this, perhaps it was a side effect from that new personality you were beginning to remember.

His shoulders tensed like he was getting ready to hit you with the butt of his gun again, but another soldier stepped in between you two.

"Minimal damage, Barsa," she said, shaking her head.

You watched Barsa's head tilt just a bit as he looked between you two, and you blew a kiss at him from the floor. He stared at you for a second before clicking his tongue angrily and turning away. "Get her off the floor and let's get this over with already."

The soldier behind you did not pull you up gently, yanking harshly on your chains, and was not kind with your handling as he pushed you towards the door. The air outside your room was cold, surprisingly so. You hadn't realised how much heat plasma barriers kept in, or how… accommodating your cell had been. Gabriel certainly had spared no expense for your comfort. Well, no, that was a lie, there was no bath in your cell and no way to hide from the cameras monitoring you when you needed to use the loo. Every now and then you could see the camera turn away from you, so you assumed that at least one of the people monitoring you twenty-four-seven had some sense of sensibility.

You walked proudly behind Barsa, working your jaw a bit to find the pain really had gone and the gash on the inside of your cheek had disappeared, though your mouth still tasted like pennies. "So, who's demanded my presence?" you asked, not really expecting any of them to answer you. Soldiers like this didn't answer to you, not anymore. Not like they did to Morrigan.

"Doctor O'Deorain," the woman responded, not bothering to look back at you.

You waited for her to continue, but she didn't, so you pressed more. "So, what, is this a tea party? An Irish family reunion? Is she secretly my mum?" you gasped, leaning forward to hover next to her shoulder. "She's secretly my mum, isn't she?"

The silence that came as your answer was heavy with disapproval and irritance.

You frowned and fell back from the tips of your toes. "Fine, keep your secrets."

O'Deorain's lab wasn't far from your cell, it turned out, and the soldiers did their best to keep you hidden from the view of others, which was a little odd, you had to admit. Warm air embraced you again once you had entered the room, and you sighed, relieved. Since when were you this sensitive to the cold?

"Ah, Miss Marsh, glad to see you're doing… well," the geneticist said, smiling wryly at you as the soldier behind you went to unlock the cuffs. The four of them were gone within seconds, the door locking shut behind them. "Won't you take a seat?"

You looked back over to the woman to see she was gesturing at an exam table, her eyes locked on you. "Not until I know what's going on," you said, shaking your head as you massaged your wrists. Those shackles had been kinda tight. "You've not brought me in here to tell me you're secretly my mum, right?"

O'Deorain's face scrunched up in disgust. She looked like she'd swallowed a lemon. "Of course not, we were nearly the same age before. Whatever brought you to that hypothesis, I hope it wasn't a malfunction in your processing system."

"You mean the omnic parts of my brain?"

Her grin was a little more patronising than you would've liked. "I don't see what else I could be referring to."

You frowned. "Okay. What did you mean by-"

"You stated you wanted to reverse Aderyn's procedure and reinstate the genetic changes she previously installed in your body when you were in her care," she said smoothly, not giving a damn that she'd interrupted you. You got the feeling you were not going to be able to make the conversation go your way just yet, or ever, with this woman. "Are you still wanting to do that?"

"Yes, but I don't know if I trust you," you said, eyeing her warily as she busied herself with vials and liquids you couldn't identify. "Angela was going to do it."

O'Deorain scoffed. "As amazing a doctor as she is, Dr. Ziegler does not have the right expertism in genetics to perform such a procedure. I cannot see her able to perform it on a banana, let alone a human, it's much too complicated," she said distastefully, shaking her head. "Dr. Morgan was an incredibly clever mind, too clever for her work to be undone by the likes of Angela."

"Yeah, if you could stop knocking my doctor, that'd be great," you mumbled, pushing your sleeves up to your elbows. "She's a great doctor, saved my life and my friend's lives on multiple occasions, and she's incredibly clever as well."

"That is all well and good, but this is genetics we're talking about. Let us leave the genetics to the geneticists and the doctoring to the doctors, shall we?" She turned to you then, polychrome eyes narrowed with a slightly wintery smile. "Have you felt any side effects?"

You blinked. "Side effects? Of what?" Your eyes widened as you remembered being trapped in her lab when you first got here. "What did you do to me?"

Her smile widened, predatory. "Nothing much. I just enabled a few non-visible aspects of your genetic sequence, the increased strength, metabolism, kicked your recovery rate up a notch. I noticed you were almost relieved to walk into the warmer temperature of my lab."

You frowned, staring at the floor. "Yeah, I was. But I've always been a freezeb-"

"That has nothing to do with your previous intolerance to the cold. It was an intended side effect, a test run, if you will. I needed to see if I was going to be able to undo any of the changes Aderyn made, and my hypothesis was correct; I can. So, when do you want to go through with the procedure, we can start as early as tomorrow morning."

"Start?" you asked dubiously, looking up to meet her gaze. There was a hunger to it that made you shudder.

"Of course, dear, did you think we were going to be able to make such comprehensive genetic changes overnight? I may be a scientist, but I am no miracle worker."

The process of switching on your genetic code was not quick, nor was it painless. You spent most of the month in your room, curled up in absolute agony as the nanites tore through your body, literally rewriting your DNA bit by bit.

The eyes were the most terrifying part; one minute you were sitting there, your body eating through the mild sedative like candy, and then you blinked, and the world shifted. No longer could you see in the usual human spectrum, all the reds disappeared, the world took on a blue hue, and you could suddenly see a few splotches on the floor that revealed you'd not been the only one to ever reside in this cell. The splotches were a weird mix of purple and yellow and it almost made your head hurt for a second before your processors kicked in and that pain settled.

Looking in the mirror during the times when this second-sight kicked in revealed your eyes to be completely dark and covered in a layer of hexagonal shapes. Blinking again and "dismissing" the sight, the layer folded back up, almost like a third eyelid. Which, you suppose, it was.

While the eyes terrified you at first, the wings were the most agonising part of the whole process. It took three weeks for them to grow in completely, first starting off as four little welts around your shoulder blades, perfectly in line with each other. As time went on, they grew, nearly tripling in size before they burst, and bits of chitin began to push through - an agonising process that felt like your upper back was entirely covered with fire-, covered in some kind of amniotic fluid, or so you guessed. When they'd finished growing in, they were just over a foot long, only just covering your lower back. For the first few nights, you struggled to keep them down, the new muscles trying to figure themselves out lending to the wings sticking out at odd angles most of the time. Each wing operated separately from the rest, which made it very difficult to finally get a hold of those tricky new muscles, but, in time, you did.

You didn't want to look in the mirror after it was all said and done, didn't want to face who you knew would be waiting there. You didn't have all her memories, but Morrigan was tormenting you from the ones you did have, and you were beginning to wonder if you really should have gone through this process at all.

'No, I did this for a reason. I'm not Morrigan, but that shouldn't stop me from using her abilities for good… That's if I ever make it out of here…' You scrunched up your nose and brows, shaking your head. You were going to get out of here. Overwatch would find you, you just had to have faith. Taking in a deep breath, you opened your eyes and looked into the mirror.

There she stood, same round face, same honey-brown eyes, same woman. Except you were less thin, not having spent most of your life fighting for survival; your eyes were kinder, seeing more of the good the world had to offer; your hair was shorter, more messy, less uniform; and you had scars that you knew Briallen had obtained, not Morrigan. You were not Morrigan. You were not Morrigan.

"I am not Morrigan," you whispered, reaching up to touch the scars on your cheek, eyes locked with the woman in the mirror. "I am Briallen Marsh. I am twenty-six… What's the date?" you called, not bothering to look away from the mirror.

"December twenty second," the guard outside your door replied.

"Ah," you sighed, nodding. "I am Briallen Marsh. I am twenty-seven years old. Happy birthday to me."

He worried for both of them, Jesse did. He worried for Briallen, suddenly snatched away by his old commander, the man who had betrayed everything he claimed to work for. He worried about what she would be subjected to, what Reyes might do to her, what she meant to him, how hard it might be to bring her back. He worried that, maybe, she might not want to come back. Conversely, he worried that she'd been stuck in a cell, waiting and wondering why it was taking so long for them to find her, for them to bring her back home. If they would ever bring her home. If Jesse had a say in it, she'd have been home before the two month mark was up. They hadn't been able to get anything out of Jay, hadn't been able to get them to reveal the Talon base they'd been keeping Briallen in. It was clear they'd interacted, it was clear Jay felt some guilt in having to leave her behind. He'd been ever so grateful to hear that Briallen was ok.

He worried for Hanzo, too. Briallen's abduction had bothered him, a lot more than Jesse would have expected. But, having someone save your life, and give theirs up to make sure you got to keep yours? That was something. It was even more of a something when you were romantically attached, formally or not. Hanzo felt like he had failed, Jesse knew that. He'd promised to keep her safe before they left, and here he was, safe, but at her behest, and she was gone.

It hurt to see Hanzo like this; he was quiet and talked an awful lot less than he normally did. Jesse couldn't tell if it was the grief or if he was already mourning. He hoped Hanzo wasn't mourning her. They'd bring her back, alive. And if they couldn't? Jesse was going to hunt down each and every last one of those Talon pieces of shit.

"Hey," Jesse murmured, coming up behind his boyfriend and wrapping his arms around the archer's waist. It was a beautiful day in the greenhouse, or, evening; it was well past six. He rested his chin on Hanzo's shoulder, watching the dragons growl and chase each other through the trees.

Hanzo grunted in response, laying his hands over Jesse's. "Has your charge given up any information yet?"

"Not yet. It's a slow process, Han. They'll talk when they're ready," Jesse assured him, pressing a kiss to his cheek.

"It has been a month, every day we waste waiting is another day she's closer to-"

"Don't start thinking that way. She's relatively safe. As long as she don't piss off Reyes, she should be okay."

Hanzo grumbled softly in Japanese, looking angrier than Jesse had seen him in a while. The dragons perked up at his words, one of them realising Jesse had appeared, and they bounded back, almost tripping over themselves as they squawked and chittered at him.

Jesse chuckled, reaching down to pet their heads, smiling down at them. "Howdy, you two. Having fun out there?" He couldn't help but laugh as one wound its way up his body, pressing its forehead against his cheek. "Yeah, missed you noodles, too. Been a while since you came out to play."

Hanzo softened, his angry expression melting into what he was truly feeling; worry. "They've been feeding off of me," he said, smiling just slightly as the other dragon stood on its hind legs, whimpering and trying to get Jesse's attention. "I thought it would be a good idea to let them run off the energy… I'm just, I'm worried about her, Jesse. I know she's tough, but... "

"I know," Jesse sighed, opening his arms to invite Hanzo in. It took him a second, but he eventually gave in and stepped into the hug, smiling when Jesse pressed their foreheads together. "We are all worried about her. If it were up to us, we would have had her home now. But we can't do anything if we don't have any information about her current location. She's strong, she'll get through this. We'll make sure she comes home safe." He smiled softly, gently rubbing his thumbs over Hanzo's cheeks. "And when we do, you can spoil her all you want."

Hanzo scoffed playfully at that. "Me? You think I will be the one to spoil her? Jesse, you've bought her flowers and chocolate and cake on more than one occasion just in the two weeks she was on leave. If anyone is going to spoil her, it's going to be you."

Jesse laughed, pressing a kiss to Hanzo's nose. "'Spose we'll have to see about that one, Han."

"Ah, there you boys are, we've been looking for you." Ana pushed her way through the foliage, raising an eyebrow at the dragon currently splayed across Jesse's shoulder, but said nothing about it. "We've received a major update. Talon has contacted us. They're proposing a trade."

Jesse stood up straight, nearly knocking the dragon off his shoulders, his brows furrowed. "A trade?"

Ana nodded, discreetly pulling a dog biscuit out of her pocket as the other dragon bounded over, curious, and fed it to him. "We have a few high profile Talon agents currently incarcerated here. They're willing to trade Briallen for a few of them. Nothing's been confirmed yet, but she should be home before Christmas."