To call Doomfist a lone wolf would be too generous. Wolves at least have some dignity.
He was a mad dog let off his chain, a violent criminal with no friends and warrants in seven countries. He was about every buzzword decent people couldn't stand, but he primarily targeted Omnics, especially anything having to do with Human-Omnic relations.
So what better target than Numbani?
The people of Nigeria called Akinjide Adeyemi "The Scourge" for good reason. He took Adhabu Ngumi's, the first Doomfist, moniker and gauntlet, his symbol of hope, and he corrupted it. He made it into a weapon of destruction instead of a tool for salvation. And that's just what he wrought: unadulterated destruction.
It was Unity Day, about 11 in the morning, when he started leveling towers. Textbook terrorism; no demands, no hostages, no warning. Just an attack aimed at an idea and intended to cause mass casualties.
The news broadcasts covering the parades and music celebrating coexistence were interrupted by the sound of an explosion, and a subsequent shock wave of red, voltaic energy. As the people started screaming and running, the cameras panned up to see the Okoya Building collapsing down onto them and the ash and debris filling the streets with an oncoming grey wall like a pyroclastic flow. Just as the screams were cutting off, replaced with the sounds of groaning steel and cracking earth, the network was hacked.
Winston remembers looking up at the monitor in the lobby of headquarters in horror, dozens of his peers gathered around him doing the same, as Adeyemi shakily filmed himself yelling into the camera.
"This city is a symbol of decadence, of complacence, of cowardly tolerance with our enemy! Millions died at their hands, and now you break bread with them! I wield the Savior's gauntlet, I fight for what he died for! I destroy the Omnics, and those who side with them! Our enemies will be made to ash! Come and stop me, you will join them in death! Numbani is mine! Send your heroes! I'll be waiting!"
Cut to black.
Overwatch's QRF is quicker than most, in the same way their dropships are quicker than most. It's just over an hour later, and the drone of the engines is almost blocked out by the vessel's thick, armored walls. It's amazing, how a craft so much like a flying tank could move so fast; they're already almost to the Nigerian border.
It's a large aircraft, large enough to fit each of the Overwatch agents inside its hold, and Reinhardt is wearing his armor. They hadn't had much prep time before takeoff, so everyone is gearing up, each in their own way now, the clicks of bullets being loaded into magazines almost thunderous in the tense air. At least, it's tense to Winston.
His mind is racing, analyzing everything he can see and even more things he can't. His armor fits the same way it always has, but he swears he can feel all of its gaps now more than ever, and he keeps imagining how badly it might hurt if some bullets find those gaps. So, he calculates the angles shooters would least likely be able to defeat his armor from, and commits it to memory to turn away from any oncoming bullets so they may be caught by the alloy he's encased in rather than his own flesh.
He knows his Tesla cannon works, that its power source is reliable and its design is sound, but he keeps picturing the trigger compressing and nothing coming out when it matters. So, he calculates the projected time it would take to fix the most likely malfunctions, and runs over the components in his mind.
But despite the fact that he is about to embark on his most crucial mission yet, his mind keeps wanting to stray away from what he should be focusing on. Memories of a birthday party, a scene from a bar, a flashback to a hillside with endless stars above keep barging into his pre-combat checks. He can't get them out of his head, no matter how hard he's focusing on everything of substance. He knows he should want them far away, but he wants them as close as he can have them.
He's looking around the hold now, trying to find a friendly pair of eyes to put him a little bit more at ease, but the throbbing of the engines are sounding more and more like war drums. Reinhardt is faceless now, his scarred eye concealed behind his helmet; it's easy to imagine him cool as ice beneath his armor, not nervous at all. Genji Shimada is the same way, but as he keeps dragging a whetstone across his katana's blade, the eerie metallic *shink* it makes somehow getting louder, his visor looks more narrow than it has before. Angela is adjusting her suit, tugging on pauldrons and squirming so it fits right while Torbjorn's rivet gun is finally holstered. Commander Morrison is adjusting his body armor too, the same way Captain Amari does directly across the aisle from him. They both are fully loaded and cocked; there is an edge to their faces that isn't normally there, no expression except for the eyes, which said too much to be interpreted. Even Lena has her war face on; when Winston's eyes meet hers, she forgets momentarily about her blasters, and smiles at him. He smiles back, but he's very sure she can tell he's faking it. Hers, on the other hand, is as picture perfect as always.
Winston imagines Commander Reyes and Jesse doing similar things with more guns in the other aircraft just now forming up off their wing; he can see them through the ventral window, leveling off with about twenty meters of air between the two wingtips.
It's very clear this is a joint op, all hands on deck with the best and brightest. There is a fleeting relief in knowing they will have some backup with Blackwatch, but that relief quickly leaves in the wake of another realization.
"Blackwatch is supposed to be in Libya."
If they were called off an op and rerouted to Numbani… Winston shudders, thinking how bad the situation must really be.
Without trying, Winston's mind once again decides to reminisce, back to the hillside in the Swiss Alps at night with Commander Morrison naming the constellations and Lena laughing louder than everyone else when Commander Reyes calls him Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and he shakes his head to refocus as he hears the same voice that named the stars coming from the front of the hold, each word echoing in his earpiece.
"Listen up!" booms Commander Morrison's voice, putting any fiddling with gear to an abrupt end, "We've got all the intel we're gonna get, so consider this a briefing!"
He takes his hand away from his earpiece for the first time in a while, and all eyes rest eagerly on him, that blue trench coat looking much smaller than it did in the holovids.
"HVT has been positively identified as Akinjide Adeyemi, call sign Doomfist. He is in possession of a heavily modified and augmented version of the kinetic gauntlet wielded by Adhabu Ngumi. So far, he has most of downtown Numbani's business center in his hand. Most noncombatants have been evacuated but command thinks there may still be innocent people near the AO, so check your targets."
Everything seems like an acronym of an acronym, and Winston is somewhere between translating and memorizing what had been said when more voices start resounding through the cabin.
"Only one target, sir?" asks Tracer without delay, shouting so her voice could be heard over the engines; she forgets everyone can hear her at normal volume through their earpieces, and Winston's ears are ringing for the next few seconds.
"Negative," comes the quick response, a disappointment in the answer as everyone realizes the stakes are exponentially higher than they'd hoped, "Nigerian police, first respondents, and military on scene have confirmed that Adeyemi is working with a heavily armed and well trained paramilitary force numbering anywhere from a few platoons in size to an entire battalion. Friendlies have been unable to confirm numbers, but they've been getting ambushed from concealed fighting positions on street level and in the buildings every time they've tried to push through. Reports are that they have downtown cordoned off, and every half hour since 11:15, Adeyemi has brought down another skyscraper."
Winston checks his wristwatch, the digital numbers inlaid into his gauntlet. Three buildings leveled so far, and a fourth about to come down, if the pattern held.
Winston looks around again, his mind wired as he calculates every factor, every miniscule detail, a supercomputer walking on its knuckles.
The AO is primarily comprised of a modern post-industrial urban environment. Skyscrapers, smaller buildings, sewer tunnels, roads; all possible infiltration/exfiltration routes as well as areas of varying cover and concealment. Shields will be crucial to survival. Areas of maximum vulnerability will be during airborne infiltration and any time spent on ground level, especially on the roads. Stealth is preferable. If not attainable, breaking contact and persisting towards Adeyemi is the next best option.
"Our priority should be ground zero," Mercy says suddenly, authoritatively, more of a statement than a suggestion, "There could be survivors."
"If we don't stop Adeyemi first, even more people will die," comes the Commander's response; there is a torment in his voice, and Winston knows why. It's his job to be detached, to do his duty and follow orders, but he wants, more than anything, to get those people out. This is the moral grey area of assigning worth to life, of making the impossible calls, and living with the consequences. Looking into Commander Morrison's face, Winston learns the haggard expression of a man who has become begrudgingly used to words like 'collateral'.
"Once we're sure no more buildings are coming down, our priority becomes disaster response," announces Reinhardt, making an unspoken peace between the circumstances and enlightening everyone on what their true purpose is. As if that point wasn't clear enough, Genji Shimada clarifies as a formality.
"Commander, with what degree of prosecution are we to treat the target?" his robotic voice asks.
"Use lethal force on sight."
We're a kill team; Winston thinks to himself we have Blackwatch, after all.
Torbjorn is next to speak, pressing for any more information he… they all… can get.
"Any identification on this paramilitary group, Commander?" he pries, his accent thicker as he raises his voice.
"Nothing confirmed," Commander Morrison growls; the way he looks down betrays him, but to those that knew him best, just the tone in his voice was enough.
"Quit dancing around it, Jack. What do we know?" crackles the very angry voice of Commander Reyes over the comms.
Winston tries to answer himself, but he never lets the words out.
Adeyemi working alone? Possible, but not likely. His known client base is incapable of organizing an attack of this scale. Vishkar? More likely. The potential funding is there, and so is the motive. Intelligence has brought up more and more connections, albeit distant connections, between Vishkar assets and less reputable characters of late. It' always cheaper to destroy than it is to build, and if Numbani is to remain a city of the future, it's likely Vishkar will get the clean up contracts once Adeyemi's tantrum is shut down. If they let him off the chain, doubtless, it'd be a net gain.
The Strike Commander does not reply to Reyes right away, and he glares as he makes an answer.
"Intel is they wear a black uniform and full head protection with red optic lenses. Body armor, military grade small arms and, we're being told, AA capability."
Commander Reyes' response is immediate.
"It's Talon!" he growls, an eagerness in his voice.
"Maybe more than Talon," thinks Winston before he realizes it doesn't really matter; they have a target who is actively massacring a peaceful people, and he must be dealt with. They why's can wait.
"We don't know that, Gabe," Commander Morrison replies only for the voice of his counterpart to come right in over the radio; the static cannot hide the disdain in his tone.
"It's enough for me, and it should be for you too!"
"I think he's right, Jack," Captain Amari says, the wheels visibly turning as she holds her rifle like a child, "Adeyemi couldn't get the funding or the infrastructure to pull something like this off on his own, and he couldn't improve the capability of the kinetic gauntlet without help. Who else has those kinds of assets that can also slip through Overwatch's and Blackwatch's radar?"
One glance and Winston knows everyone in the ship is in agreement; the dots are connected, and they are making a very ugly picture. Talon they know is a for sure culprit. It had played its hand, and Doomfist was its ace in the hole. This attack is everything Talon represents; clearly anti-Omnic, devastating in effect and professionally executed. But this attack is different; it is loud and public, not secretive and from the shadows as it had always been before, and with the way Atlas News had been hacked, it sure seemed like Adeyemi was calling Overwatch out.
"Send your heroes! I'll be waiting!"
He wouldn't be waiting much longer.
"These are the bastards that got Lacroix," Commander Reyes growls over the radio, his voice startlingly clear, "It's time for some fucking payback!"
This just became more than a mission. This just became personal, exactly what Morrison didn't want to happen on the outside, but in his eyes, Winston sees the Strike Commander wants payback just as badly as Gabriel. Maybe more.
As they cross the Nigerian border, Winston completes his third meticulous gear check. On their approach vector to Numbani, his mind momentarily fixates on the people in black he imagines the size of ants so far below them.
Talon is antimatter; it exists to destroy, to undo peace and harmony. In many ways, its motives are as shrouded as the organization itself, but they are coming more and more into the light with each encounter. To put it simply, Talon ignores the peace treaty struck between man and machine, the same way they ignore every international convention outlawing crimes against humanity.
Winston never knew the Lacroix family, at least not well. The tragedy that befell them happened after he'd come to Earth, but well before he officially joined Overwatch. He knew of them, but he didn't know much more than Amelie and Gerard's names, or their portraits next to identical caskets at the funeral in the cathedral at Notre Dame. But that didn't matter; he'd seen the looks on the other agents' faces at that memorial, the agents that did know them, not as friends but as family.
Winston has heard the stories; stories from the rescue team that pulled Amelie from Talon's grasp after being tortured for months, stories from the response team that found Gerard in his bed after he'd been murdered, and stories, more like rumors, that Amelie, who'd been presumed dead, went back to Talon. It would almost be preferable if she had been in the empty casket next to Gerard's, sprinkled in holy water and covered first in white linen, then in black cemetery dirt.
By the looks on the others' faces now, the pain that loss had caused is still far from gone. Winston can feel that pain slowly turning into rage all around him, and it is equal parts humbling and unsettling.
Suddenly, a loud groan from the back of the hold rips Winston out of his thoughts, and his eyes dart over to see the rear cargo ramp of the dropship lowering. The cold thin wind rushes into the cabin, and Winston, seated closest to the ramp on the aircraft's starboard side, leans forward to look at the Earth below.
They are over the golden savanna now, only a few hundred feet off the ground. He can see gazelles leaping as they run from the aircraft's shadow. Off their wing, Blackwatch's aircraft still hovers, keeping perfect pace with them; the second aircraft's ramp is down too, and Winston knows they are approaching their target. His mouth is dry, and he feels like he is about throw up. If not for the cold wind, he may have already. The lurching of the aircraft and the confined space is making him claustrophobic, and he is reminded of the days he spent in a cramped space module. Not pleasant memories.
As the aircraft speeds onward, the smell of the air begins to change. At first Winston does not recognize it, but before long he realizes the scent is that of smoke. It isn't wood smoke; it smells more rotten than that, and it leaves a burn on the insides of his nostrils.
Next, the air outside the cabin grows hazy.
Winston feels the aircraft pitch and roll into a turn, and the grasslands give way to concrete and glass far below. What Winston sees stays with him for years.
Numbani is a total war zone.
Ash fills the streets like a blanket of new fallen snow, burning cars and fire trucks form a ring of fire along Talon's perimeter, and piles of rubble stories high take the places of buildings all throughout downtown. The streets around the business center are barren except for abandoned vehicles, and the streets away from the attack's epicenter are filled with people, a mass exodus departing the city behind them. Through the haze of downtown, Winston can see the bright orange streaks of tracer rounds being exchanged in a firefight between Talon and what has to be the Nigerian military. By the looks of it, the Nigerians are in crossfire, and more bullets are coming in than going out.
Through his communicator, Winston hears Commander Morrison address their pilot.
"Circle the city and land us close to the disaster zone! Then pull back and establish a holding pattern 2 clicks out! Be ready to provide CAS within one minute if I call it in!"
Winston hears the words like they're from a dream. He's seeing hell through his eyeglasses; he swears he can see bodies down there, crimson outlined silhouettes against the grey ash. He sees military gun trucks on fire, entire convoys stopped in their tracks as they tried to get to those trapped in the rubble.
"Where do you suppose Doomfist is?" he hears Jesse over the radio.
He sees his watch blink to forty-five minutes past noon. His hair stands up with a static tingle as he sees the red shock wave of electricity expanding out from a single point at the base of the Jammeh Building downtown. He sees it come down in slow motion, slanting as it collapses onto itself then buckles into three pieces, a black cloud rising up to swallow it as sixty-three stories and who knows how many people disappear.
"I'll give you three guesses, cowboy," Reyes sneers, static in his ear.
Winston sees it all in suspended animation, watching as if he weren't really there, as if he were seeing it all on a screen like millions around the world.
They continue circling, coming completely around the city once, before they come in for a landing. The minute and a half it takes them to descend and maneuver feels like a lifetime. For a moment, before he chases it away again, the memory comes back, a memory of candles on a cake and his friends gathered around. Winston looks back at those same friends who had been there, almost unrecognizable; those that aren't wearing masks might as well be, their smiles replaced with warriors' scowls. Ten of them between the two dropships, going up against a small army on their own.
We few...
"You alright big guy?!"
He turns to his right, to Lena, and looks into her eyes, a deep hazel even behind the tint of her goggles. It hits him all over again as he comes back into the present: the ash, the smoke, the building that just came down.
"I think so," he stammers as his stomach turns over.
"Don't worry!" she says over the engines, nothing hindering their roar with the cargo ramp open, "We stick together, we'll get through this! Numbani needs us!"
She smiles briefly as a reassurance, but Winston knows it's more than that. He feels the same way, fulfilled. He is terrified, claustrophobic in a government funded air taxi with machine guns over a burning city whose current heavily armed denizens are no doubt watching them come in and preparing to hit them as they are the most vulnerable. But, he knows what he is doing is right, that it is worth doing, and he knows that is more than some people ever get. Numbani needs them, the world needs them, and so they answer.
We happy few...
They're slowing down now, and bleeding altitude even faster. The jump is coming, and they are ready for it.
"Tell the Nigerian military to hit as many points along the perimeter as possible!" Commander Morrison tells their pilot, "The diversion will buy us some room!"
Winston looks around the cabin at his closest friends one last time before he hears the pilot's voice in his earpiece.
For he who sheds his blood with me today...
"Incoming!"
He feels the explosion, he does not hear it. The last thing he feels before going black is the turbulent gut-wrenching sensation of spinning.
The smell of smoke is sweeter now, not pungent but pleasing. Through the silence, a song is being sung, quietly at first, but as it reaches its high notes, he realizes who is singing. Reinhardt is the loudest; under his voice he hears Lena, only slightly more on key, then Angela in perfect pitch. He can hear Commander Morrison too, and Jesse and Torbjorn, but their baritone voices are barely registering over the others.
He remembers the cake, under baked and with too few candles; it had Skippy in the batter. He remembers how Commander Reyes didn't sing, but was the first to cut into the cake. He remembers opening his gifts. First a massive flannel shirt, from Jesse. Then a huge pair of tan jeans, from Commander Morrison. A giant pair of boots from Reinhardt, a sweater from Torbjorn, a black hoodie from Reyes and a leather jacket from Lena.
By the time he's done, he has a full wardrobe.
When he looks up to the others, no words to say, they all smile.
"Lena said you told her you weren't feeling like you fit in," Angela says, her blue eyes brighter than her smile somehow.
"So, we went down to Big & Tall. Gotcha some clothes to get'cha out in the world like a regular ol' Joe," explains Commander Morrison, his arms crossed and his smile subtle.
"You do like it, don't you love?" Tracer asks.
"It's perfect," Winston says, a smile finally breaking on his face.
"Good," Commander Reyes says, smiling wryly, "Now get changed, we're taking you out. I'm gonna show you a good time, mono."
Winston does not move while the others head for the door, all of them laughing at something Jesse had said, but Winston stays where he is, looking down at what his friends had done for him. They're allowing him to be like them; they're allowing him to be normal, and that is something he has never had. That's something he had always wanted. Not a shirt and a jacket, not clothes, but simply to belong, to be treated like a person, like a human being.
It is the best gift he has ever received, and as he watches them all, smiling and laughing with arms around one another's shoulders, one word comes to mind.
Home
It's a few minutes before Commander Morrison comes back for him.
"Let's go!" he calls out, a friendly impatience in his voice.
But then the world begins to swirl. Other sounds bleed through the walls: thunder, breaking glass, car alarms and indistinct shouting.
Commander Morrison's yell becomes more urgent.
"Let's Go! Move!"
The walls fall away, and the storm outside becomes deafening. Gunfire, that sharp whip crack of bullets snapping by, and the menacing sound of their impact against concrete and steel. Winston feels a weight against his chest, and his ribs feel like they're half an inch from snapping. He's short of breath, able to breathe but unable to breathe deeply. The sweetness in the smoke flits away.
"WINSTON!" he hears Tracer's voice yell, and it is as if someone suddenly turned on the lights.
Winston wakes up like he'd drifted to sleep unwillingly; suddenly, and with quick breaths as he looks around. The blur of a grey world around him is interrupted by streaks of orange light. Kneeling next to him, behind a concrete slab, he makes out orange legs, a brown torso interrupted by an orb of light blue.
"Winston!" he hears Lena's voice say, and he feels her hands lightly slap his cheek, "Get up, love!"
There is an abnormal urgency to her tone, and even behind her visor her eyes are wide. A whip cracks above them, and after she ducks, Lena empties her blasters over the top of her piece of cover at some unseen target.
"Whole thing's gone bollocks!" she yells as she comes back down to him, "We need you in this fight!"
He sees the others hazily, taking cover all around him. Reinhardt shepherds them, his shield up and his hammer in one hand as he absorbs the incoming fire, those few rounds that make it through his shield bouncing off his armor to no effect in a shower of sparks. He cannot see Genji or Torbjorn, or Reyes and Jesse. Commander Morrison and Ana are trading rounds with whoever is shooting at them, firing up and down the street. Angela is trying to stop the pilot's bleeding, her Valkyrie suit more red now than white; she is near frantic, something that only happens when she is close to losing a patient. The noise is deafening; over the gunfire, he can barely hear Commander Morrison.
"COME ON! RETURN FIRE!" he yells, the muzzle of his own rifle lighting up his face, "WE NEED AIR SUPPORT, NOW! DANGER CLOSE ON CRASH SITE ALPHA!"
Suddenly, a rocket propelled grenade darts past Reinhardt's head and explodes in the rubble by Winston; Tracer covers her head as the blast throws her forward, and the world goes silent under the whine of Winston's ringing ears. He goes to displace, baring his teeth as his heartbeat throbs in his temples, but finds he cannot move.
He's pinned under a wing panel and no small amount of concrete and re bar, their drop ship's nose buried in the ground floor of a bank just behind him and a groove of torn up asphalt showing right where it'd come down. The shredded engine and blown up wing just outside where Winston's seat had been makes it obvious they had been shot down.
"We have to get out!" yells Captain Amari between firing rounds, "We're suppressed here!"
"We've got heavy rain inbound in thirty seconds!" replies Morrison as he ducks down to reload, rounds chipping away at his cover.
"That may not be soon enough!" bellows Reinhardt as he lowers his shield and swings his hammer along the ground, the pulse rippling forward, down the street, to obliterate one of the cars their enemy is using as cover.
Winston regains his all at that moment, and grimaces as he braces his arms against the rubble pinning him in place. He leans against it, then presses, then pushes with everything he has, and only then does it budge. He pushes hard, bullets pinging off the hull of the aircraft folded around him; he screams with effort, the piercing shriek of a silverback, and he is free.
And then his world becomes the inside of a violent snow globe.
The second drop ship, the Blackwatch vessel, speeds in from a side street, its wings all but scraping the buildings on its sides as ash spirals in its jet wash. Its engines oscillate and it drifts, like a race car doing a power slide, coming to a sudden stop directly over the crash site, and Winston sees the Gatling guns in the nose spin up as the down blast from the engines throws up the settled ash like a blizzard. It starts as a hum, then a whir, then a roar louder than thunder and it's raining hot shell casings. A stream of tracers, like a dragon's breath, sweeps the street and the buildings they are taking fire from with devastating effect; cars catch fire, glass shatters, anything combustible explodes and the incoming fire stops as red Blackwatch bullets ricochet off the pavement, arcing towards the horizon as they continue on like fireworks.
Winston moves to cover Tracer with his body, the singeing rounds taking no effect on his hard armor, and he sees a rope drop down from above. Commander Reyes and Jesse fast rope down. Mercy ties the wounded pilot to the same rope that had delivered their Blackwatch counterparts, and giving it a tug, she is lifted to the sky.
The drop ship peels away, and the ash begins to settle again. In the absence of ear splitting noise, the sudden silence is almost more frightening.
"Let's move!" Reyes roars as his boots splash in the flaky ash, and he is already stalking down the street towards Doomfist's last known location, Jesse close behind.
At a trot, they fall in on Reyes, but not before Tracer blinks out from underneath Winston and throws a pulse bomb on the drop ship's instrument panel.
Formed up, they move on their target, leaving nothing behind at the crash site except brass, a hollow burning air frame, and their footprints in the slowly falling ash.
There's a rhythm to Reinhardt's movement as he leads them down an alleyway, an unwavering beat with each footstep as they press on, looking for Doomfist. Behind Reinhardt is Morrison, then Reyes and McCree. Angela is in the middle, by Lena and Torbjorn. Genji hovers near her, his visor scanning back and forth, up and down the buildings, his fingers tapping on the handle of the smaller of his swords. Winston brings up the rear with Captain Amari, watching their backs.
It feels like they're in a snowfall without the cold; the ash is whiter here. Through the drifts, in the shadows, Winston swears he can see movement. Every shadow is a Talon agent stalking them, every sound is a gun cocking, every sway in the air by the wind, in his mind, is Doomfist, grinning, making good on his promise.
I'll be waiting.
Off in the distance, machine guns rattle in bursts, not unlike distant calls of birds or the chirping of insects. In the quiet, Winston's mind once again wanders beneath the tension.
He sees Jack Morrison turn and sweep an overpass with his rifle as they cross a side street, his eyes cold and glossy in focus, and he remembers how those blue eyes would brighten a room when he rarely laughed, or how they could silence a room with a glare. He sees Reinhardt silent in focus, the metal in his gauntlets all but grinding at the handle of the hammer in his grip, and recalls his bellowing laugh, the pride in his triumphant voice telling stories. He sees Jesse's lips wrapped around a cigar, but thinks of those same lips drawling along to the script of The Outlaw Josey Wales. He sees how Captain Amari holds her rifle, almost cradling it, and thinks of how she holds Fareeha, the same way. He sees Torbjorn's turrets, compacted down and latched onto his belt, but he thinks of his family waiting for him back in Sweden. He sees Reyes move, and thinks of how he danced at the bar on his birthday all that time ago, fluid, effortlessly, knowing what to do far before he ever got there, thinking only of his partner.
"New intel," he hears Commander Morrison say over the comms, "Satellite imagery shows Talon concentration on the Aetria Corporate building. They think that's the next target."
And so they go.
They cordon the building, surrounding it and cutting off any avenues of escape. Winston is at a blocking position; he can't see any hostiles, as he is a block and a half away down a likely retreat path, but he hears Captain Amari over the radio calling targets from her perch in some building with line of sight.
"Twenty-five targets, plus one HVT. Small arms mostly, and one machine gun team. We will initiate on my shot."
When the shooting starts, Winston hears the action, he doesn't see it.
But that changes soon after.
"Winston, Doomfist slipped through! He's headed your way!"
When he sees him, Doomfist is sprinting down the street toward him alone, looking back over his shoulder at the gunfire behind him. Akinjide Adeyemi is a specimen of the new world's black market. His hulking muscles are far too large to be natural, either the product of banned steroids or some underground surgical implant. He wears military pants and boots, and is shirtless under his body armor. His exoskeletal suit reinforces his bones; it looks like the suit is secured directly to his body, drilled right into him at key points of movement. He leans to the arm his gauntlet is on as he moves, its weight pulling him with every movement.
"Stop!" Winston yells as he jumps into the street in front of Adeyemi, "You're under arrest!"
His brown eyes snap forwards, and they fill with fire. Winston levels the Tesla Cannon, and as it starts whirring, Doomfist jumps, voltaic crimson building around his kinetic gauntlet. Winston lets loose a beam of electricity as Adeyemi soars down at him, but it does nothing; Winston rolls out of the way at the last minute, and the Doomfist gauntlet craters the pavement where he was standing.
Before Winston can even recover, Doomfist's shoulder is in his stomach, and he is being tackled to the ground. All of Commander Reyes' fighting lessons come back to him, and Winston rolls, throwing Adeyemi off of him and getting to his feet quickly. But again, before he can reacquire and fire, Adeyemi is upon him.
Akinjide Adeyemi fights like a bull, with reckless abandon, all offense and no defense. He even roars, yelling with each strike and breathing in grunts.
Winston tries to counter Adeyemi's next hay maker, but can't get out of the way. Luckily it wasn't a fully charged strike; it only dents his breastplate, and throws him across the street, through a window, and halfway through a wall. He gets back to his feet with a groan, dizzy and in pain masked with adrenaline, before he jumps back out into the street.
He lands on his knuckles in the ash, and sees Adeyemi on the opposite curb, raising his arms tauntingly at him.
"Call yourself an agent!" he yells through the smog, "You belong in a zoo!"
Winston shakes his head, almost laughing; he's jeering at him, just like in every superhero movie where the hero and villain finally throw down. For a moment, he forgets his ribs' pain, and the fading gunfire back at the Aetria Corporate building. For the sake of banter, Winston makes a response.
"Prison's not so different than a zoo," he shouts back, "You'll have to tell me what it's like."
For the first time, Winston sees Adeyemi smile, his pointed chin and under bite practically jutting out towards him.
"And who is going to bring me in?" he laughs before pointing, "You, Monkey?"
Winston growls a low growl, coming from the nerve he'd struck.
"I'm not a monkey," he snarls under his breath with a glare, and he pushes his glasses farther up his nose.
And with that, Adeyemi charges and Winston beats his chest, then triggers his thrusters. Ash flies up behind him as he shoots across the street, and his massive arm close lines Doomfist midair, sending him flailing into a light pole. It folds around him, and clatters to the ground in a shower of sparks.
Before Doomfist can get up again, Winston grabs him by a leg, and with a roar, throws him across the street to cave the side of a car in; its alarm resounds through the city, until Doomfist, enraged and bleeding from his nose and mouth, crushes the engine compartment.
Winston smiles, satisfied. It felt good, hitting back. But as Adeyemi stalks back across the street towards him, he realizes he's only pissed him off more, and the smile fades.
Tough bastard.
Winston fumbles with his Tesla Cannon, trying to charge it up for an EMP, but as it's getting ready to fire, Doomfist swings. Winston ducks the blow, the wind from the strike blowing his hair, and he tries to counter. Adeyemi steps around Winston's simian fist, and puts him in a hold from the rear.
Adeyemi throws him; Winston recovers in flight, landing on his feet, but he drops his Tesla Cannon. Doomfist gets to it first, and crushes it in his gauntlet, snapping it in two. Winston roars at him, and pounds the ground. Adeyemi smiles again, and Winston thinks of a lion.
"Why are you fighting?" Adeyemi says, pointing, "They are only Omnics."
They're starting to respect each other as adversaries; they slowly circle each other now, neither giving ground but neither ready to attack quite yet.
"You're an idiot if you think I'm fighting just for them," comes Winston's response.
Adeyemi grows angrier, and he turns so the kinetic gauntlet is behind him; Winston doesn't see it start glowing red, charging up.
"You'll die just for them! Just like thousands have before you!" Adeyemi says with scorn, and his voice cracks a bit as he yells, "Or have you forgotten!?"
"No one has!" Winston yells back, throwing his arms as he gestures, "This city was supposed to honor the dead, to put the crisis behind us!"
Adeyemi bares his teeth, and his eyes narrow as his tone gains an edge. It comes forward as a breath, a hiss, betraying the wrath inside him.
"You really believe that?" he asks, almost like he pities Winston, like he knows something he doesn't.
Adeyemi doesn't wait for a response; he rushes Winston, dodges his massive hand as it comes at his head, and connects against his chest armor with a devastating uppercut. The sound is like an explosion, as if everything rushed into the point of impact before rushing outwards in a crash of energy. Again, Winston flies through the air and through a window across the street, but this time he doesn't stop at one wall. He goes all the way through, crashing through the windows on the opposite side of the building, and careening into the street.
The pain is the kind where you can't breathe, where even that simple movement of the diaphragm sends jolts of paralyzing hurt all over. Winston doesn't even groan, because even that would make it hurt more. He tastes blood in his mouth and feels it going down the back of his throat. If his lower ribs weren't broken before, they are now; Winston can feel the sharp prod inside of him, and one of his arms is bent slightly the wrong way.
He comes back slowly. He's lying on his side at the mouth of an alleyway. He looks up, and can see the hole he'd made as he went through the office building above. His glasses are gone, lying with cracked lenses a few feet away. He's able to lift himself to his knees, bracing himself upright gingerly on his knuckles.
Adeyemi suddenly materializes over him, hardly a silhouette; Winston's vision is blurry, and he's seeing more stars than flakes of ash. Adeyemi is breathing heavily, and he raises his gauntlet slowly over Winston, its shadow consuming his face. But, the blow never falls. Instead, Adeyemi looks up, down the street, and smiles ominously.
Adeyemi walks away, and his gauntlet's hum grows louder. Winston looks down at his wristwatch; it's 1:15, thirty minutes after the Jammeh building came down.
"How many people did you kill today already?" Winston manages to whimper as he stumbles, trying to stand back up.
"Not enough!" Adeyemi yells back, his gauntlet beginning to surge.
"You're insane!" Winston coughs, the ash and blood in his throat cementing.
"I've got at least nine more to finish off," Adeyemi says as he looks up the street, "then you."
Winston follows his gaze, back to the Aetria Corporate building, where every other Overwatch agent is cleaning up after their ambush. He can see them, but the others can't see him. They have a perimeter set up, and Mercy is tending to the wounded; Winston sees Jesse and Commander Morrison have been hit. It's then that he realizes he hasn't been listening to his comms; they have no idea what's coming their way.
"No," Winston whimpers as he realizes what Adeyemi is doing; Doomfist means to level the building he'd just sent Winston through, toppling it right onto the rest of Overwatch.
"No," he says louder, and he struggles to get up.
He feels it building inside of him, the same feeling he'd felt on the observatory floor on Horizon. The rage fills him, up to the top of his throat, but in those last six inches he feels something else, something cool and comforting. Love.
He knows what he has to do; there is still time, but not much.
He roars, and the rage takes hold, pouring out and seizing him, taking control; his hair stands on edge as he gets to his feet, blood rushing through him in a surge of adrenaline, and for once, he doesn't have to think what to do. Doomfist is raising his gauntlet, so he relies on instinct and passion. He forgets the pain.
He goes primal.
"I've lost my family once!" he yells as he charges Adeyemi, pummeling the pavement with each footfall; he puts everything he has into a punch that lands on Doomfist's chin, leveling him, "Not again!"
Winston holds nothing in reserve; everything is fair game. He beats Adeyemi against the asphalt, he bites, he pounds him with both hands, he rips the exoskeletal suit out of him. He tears skin and shatters bone.
He fights like a wild animal.
He fights until the muscles in his arms burn and his broken ribs scream for him to stop moving.
Adeyemi is bent, bloody and broken when Winston grabs him by the neck, his hand all but engulfing the entirety of his head, and gets ready to twist. He screams, louder than Adeyemi does in pain and fear, but before he goes through with it, he hears a voice.
"Winston!"
It's high pitched and afraid, and Winston whips around, Adeyemi still in his hands, to see Lena in the mouth of the alleyway, looking at him with wide eyes, horrified. She covers her mouth with both hands, and her eyes dart back and forth between the mangled body of Doomfist and Winston, his eyes red and his chest heaving angrily.
When she looks into his eyes, Winston snaps out of it, and he lets Doomfist fall to the ash.
More and more members of Overwatch trickle in after Tracer, hearing the commotion. Commander Morrison arrives second with a bandage around his arm, and stops in his tracks when he sees Doomfist at Winston's feet. Commander Reyes is right behind him, the Jesse, wounded in the shoulder but not badly. Then the rest arrive; most of them look at Winston with some kind of fearful reverence, but Gabriel Reyes just smiles. Winston doesn't look at any of them; he doesn't want to acknowledge that the convulsing wreck of flesh and bone and metal at his feet was his creation, his sculpture that started as a man, an evil man.
He doesn't want to face the others; he doesn't want them to see him this way, this savage way. So he pushes past them, and limps to the street, plopping down next to his glasses as all the pain rushes back to him. He blows the lenses off, and in their reflection he sees Lena, that same horrified look on her face as she looks at his back, and Angela kneels by Adeyemi's side.
Winston puts the glasses on, but he wipes his eyes first; it should never have come to this, but he did what he had to; up to a point. The animal in him had done the rest.
Then the pain rushes back, crippling him again.
Behind him, he hears Commander Morrison talking into the radio.
"HVT has been neutralized. Mission successful."
It's three days until they get back to the Watchpoint, three days spent helping the disaster response teams, sifting through the rubble to find people, most of them dead, most of them not even recognizable. But every now and then, they would pull somebody breathing out from the grey sea of death, and they would cheer.
The debriefs are long, but vague. All the brass are interested in is the body count and the damages: numbers. They don't ask about who was buried in that rubble, only how many. The final estimation is between six and eight thousand died in the attack; missing posters are all over Numbani for the next three months, a last hope of people denying their relatives and friends died because one man decided the crisis wasn't over yet.
To Winston's horror, a security camera outside of the Aetria Corporate building had captured his first punch on Adeyemi's chin, when he'd first gone primal. Thankfully, the rest of the fight's culmination happened just outside of the camera's frame of sight. The tape has gone viral; fans of Overwatch, kids, have dubbed the move, the "primal punch".
He came to find out that Overwatch medical staff had been able to save Doomfist; his gauntlet was confiscated, his assets were frozen, and he was sentenced to four hundred and thirty-six life sentences in a trial he was unable to attend as he was still suffering through a state funded medical recovery, which was more of a medical rebuilding thanks to Winston. A court of appeals granted him the death sentence a month later.
The other members of Overwatch treated him differently after Numbani. It took Tracer a while to talk to him normally after that day. Winston thought for a while she saw him as a monster; she definitely saw him as something more dangerous than she did before.
Gabriel Reyes seemed to like him a bit more, but he never let up on a chance to remind him of the time he'd gone savage, or tell others the story, in Winston's presence, of how he'd rounded the corner and seen Adeyemi's lower jaw hanging onto his skull by a strand of tendon and chunks of muscle hanging onto the exoskeleton after it had been torn out of his body, with Winston standing over him, "beating his chest like King-Kong".
Winston normally walked away before Reyes could finish the story. He knew it was a soft spot, and the disdain in his voice when he called him monkey never did go away.
But after that day, Winston was one of the family. They'd bled together; they'd saved what was left of a city together. And regardless of what they thought of how he did it, he'd saved them.
One night, many weeks later, Winston enters Overwatch's intelligence database, and pulls every file they have on Akinjide Adeyemi.
Doomfist had lost his family too.
He grew up poor in Ghana, and had lost his family in the Omnic Crisis. His father and brother were military casualties. His mother died of malaria, because an Omnic siege kept medical aid arriving to deliver vaccines. His sister committed suicide soon after. He had been nineteen. With nothing left, he joined Ghana's militia, and waged a guerrilla war against the Omnium in Abuja. His unit suffered heavy casualties at the Battle of Cape Coast, the same battle the first Doomfist, Adhabu Ngumi, fought and died in to save the West Coast of Africa. Hence, "The Savior".
When peace was found, Adeyemi never stopped fighting; his war never ended. He started small, then graduated to mercenary work. By the time Talon found him, and gifted him the recovered and augmented kinetic gauntlet, all they had to do was point him in the right direction. A mad dog, yes, but he wasn't born bloodthirsty. What made his so evil was that he truly, at his core, believed what he was doing was right.
Winston remembers that day often, and not fondly.
Doomfist showed him the truth. He showed him how the world really works, how fragile it all is. He showed him that the only constant is change. He showed him that it's easier to see people as a code name, or as a target. Doomfist showed him what he could do, and that terrified him sometimes; he showed him that there is still an animal inside of him, no matter what.
Doomfist, The Savior, used his kinetic gauntlet to destroy thousands of Omnics as they advanced on cities all across western Africa. And in recent Shambali light, each and every one of those Omnics he destroyed had a soul. And for his destruction, the people of Nigeria and Ghana built statues and wrote ballads; they made a martyr into a hero, a symbol.
Doomfist, The Scourge, attacked Omnics too. But for him, the response was outrage, disgust. The only real difference between them is how African children would learn their names generations later, one as a hero, and one as a villain, for trying to destroy the same thing.
Years later, Overwatch would be treated the same way. A hero one day, a villain the next, because the world they served decided their service was no longer required.
Three days before he was to be executed, the prison he was being held in was attacked by an unidentified paramilitary force, and in the aftermath, Akinjide Adeyemi was left unaccounted for.
On that day, Reinhardt helped Winston get slobbering drunk.