Gibraltar is a quiet place, but it's home. At least, it used to be home.
He and Athena are the only ones still around. Normal people don't consider computer programs friends, but Athena is all Winston has now.
When this fortress on a rocky outcropping had been home to hundreds of people, Winston would spend his nights in a laboratory, his place of refuge, doing whatever he or Commander Morrison had prioritized for that week. Only when the sky was turning from black to purple would he normally find a pillow in his habitation suite, and rest for a few hours.
Tonight, he walks the silent halls. There's a rhythm to it.
Knuckle, foot, knuckle, foot, see if there's any peanut butter left in this jar or that one, knuckle foot, knuckle, foot, hit the tire swing and watch it swing, knuckle, foot, knuckle, foot, find something to do, or something to remember.
"Is everything alright Winston?" comes Athena's voice over the PA.
"Yes Athena," he says back, no one to look at while he talks, "I just can't sleep."
Winston had modeled Athena after the Omnic god-programs. When she was new, she was already the most advanced AI in the world, a supercomputer with a hangar full of servers as a brain and Overwatch's entirety of assets at her disposal. She's gotten smarter since then; all the best AI's learn, but Athena is special. She learned to have humanity. At first, it terrified Overwatch, having a more powerful computer than some governments' compilation of hardware with a personality.
Do you read me, Hal?
Luckily, Athena decided she would be one of the good guys. In some ways, she had done more for the world than every one of Overwatch's agents combined in those last few years; the world was a hard place to fix with bullets and missiles in the digital age. Athena could do things no person could. Winston was glad for her, especially now.
He needed someone to talk to.
"Winston, has the recent invasion of Watchpoint Gibraltar by Talon made you uneasy here?" she asks, her tone fluctuating, "I can reassure you, the odds of Talon returning tonight are very low."
He keeps walking; he's in the old mess hall now.
"Restlessness is a characteristic symptom of post traumatic stress and major depression. If you would like, report to the medical bay, and I can provide a diagnosis."
He looks around at the empty tables, and he swears, he can smell currywurst and he can hear hear Captain Amari's voice, maternal and friendly, but with that higher pitch hinting that she was close to laughing.
"You need to take care of yourself Winston. What would we do if you were to fall ill? Nothing would get done and everything on base would stop working."
He hears Torbjorn chuckle, and he feels Reinhardt's hand hit his shoulder with a friendly clap.
"Thanks, but I'm fine Athena," he sighs as he turns to go, "I'm just seeing ghosts."
Ana was like that: maternal. Her protective instinct was humbling. She always put her concern for others before her concern for herself. With her on the long gun, anyone under her protection might as well have been invincible, but she was more than a sniper. She was a hero, and a friend, and a mother. She was who kept all of Overwatch safe when things got bad and alive when they got even worse. She was good, always in the ops room during planning making sure each route was the best protected and always the first to go on recon, and she never sent anyone in her place, ever. It's what killed her, in the end.
She died on a rescue mission about three months before Switzerland. She stayed behind to cover the retreat when the strike team with the rescued hostages came under fire from a sniper. Her body was never recovered. They buried an empty casket in the Hadra War Cemetery.
Winston thinks of Fareeha, already a young officer, saluting the flag covered coffin as men in berets carried it past.
Winston keeps walking.
His ears twitch when he thinks he hears footsteps, but he soon realizes it's just the rain starting. It's autumn, the rainy season in this part of the world. Storms roll in daily, but Athena's forecast said the worst of this one would hit Casablanca, putting Gibraltar right on the brim of the clouds.
Through the window, in the distance, lightning flashes, and Winston is drawn to it.
He finds his way to the helicopter pad, despite Athena advising against it on the basis that he might catch a cold. He hears Ana in her robotic tone.
The split between the stars and the storm is right above him; to the south, the sky is flashing with bright blue streaks of electricity as they jump in between clouds and the ocean, and to his north, the night sky twinkles. He can see Venus, and Mars.
The moon is out; it's almost full. If he had a telescope, he could see Horizon.
Far below him, against the cliffs, the Mediterranean laps, each wave sounding like a breath from the sea itself.
Lightning flashes over Africa, the thunder grumbling at him a few moments after. As he feels the breeze and smells the surf, the light from the south snaps to dark once again, and Commander Morrison is with him, sitting on a fuel pod and his blue eyes looking up.
"Makes you feel small, doesn't it?"
Winston would have agreed.
"You know what goes into each and every one of those stars up there, how much power is in just one thunderhead, just how huge everything is, and here we are, caught in the middle."
Winston admires Orion's belt, and thinks of the pyramids built to imitate those same stars outside Cairo. Ana used to say she could see them from her apartment, before the Crisis. He knows Morrison is smiling with him.
"Makes you think, maybe there is a God after all."
The man flicks a finger towards the moon, then crosses his arms.
"You ever miss it?" he asks.
"Yes," Winston says, "There's a lot that I miss."
Lightning flashes again, a bit closer this time, and Winston is alone once more.
He turns and goes back inside, before he is soaked as Athena warned.
Commander Morrison was a man with layers. His first layer was armor, a hollow suit that fought when it was told to where it was told to. His second layer dared to ask why, and his third layer answered: for them. Anyone else: his team, civilians, other soldiers he didn't even know. Bleed, so they don't have to. The Soldier Enhancement Program built men into specimens of human aggression, walking weapons with superhuman muscles and minds; Commander Morrison, Gabriel Reyes, they were super soldiers. They could do things other people couldn't, and so the world called on them to do things others wouldn't be able to. Winston thinks it was that third layer that made Commander Morrison have faith in him, to push for his induction to Overwatch against everyone who said a UN coalition was no place for a freak. Commander Morrison was a great man because got Winston into Overwatch, made him an agent, made him head lab technician and director of research and development because he didn't care who Winston was, he cared for what he could do.
I have a dream...
Winston's vigil persists, and next he finds himself inside his old lab, looking up at the blueprints he holds onto as keepsakes. The chronal accelerator, the bubble shield, even a schematic for a reverse engineered Doomfist gauntlet.
A thought crosses his mind, and he picks up a soldering iron, fiddling with the shield to see if he can get it to stop blowing up somehow before his patience leaves and he keeps wandering these empty halls.
"Winston, you are aware of the definition of insanity?" Athena says, and he snorts; if anything's driving him insane, it isn't this.
Sparks begin to fall slowly, like tiny fireflies flashing through his worktable, and in the wisps of smoke, someone joins him.
"What are you working on?" he hears Reyes say from behind him from, the voice coming silently up from a time after Numbani had already been rebuilt by Vishkar after Doomfist trashed it, and well before the ink on the Petras Act had dried.
"Something useless, I'm sure," he adds, but Winston does not reply.
Winston hears two pairs of boots, one with spurs, but Jesse, Reyes' constant companion, doesn't say anything as his lighter flicks a flame, and he lights a smoke. Reyes leans against Winston's work table, his arms crossed and he pretends to be intrigued by his creation as his holstered guns brush against the tabletop.
"Your debrief from Numbani was just declassified," he says, that look on his face saying 'I know something you don't.'
Winston looks at him over the lenses of his glasses for a moment, then goes back to his task at hand. Reyes seems to be prying, trying to provoke some kind of defense, but Winston doesn't give him the satisfaction. His armor is on, in more ways than one.
"So," Reyes begins again, smiling at the pettiness of their relationship, "between keeping a building from coming down on us and helping out that Oxton kid..."
His smile fades, and Reyes looks Winston in the eyes, even though those amber eyes are still ignoring him, expecting some sort of harassing comment or a sprinkle of salt in some open wound Winston didn't even know was vulnerable. He keeps working, expecting to be called monkey any time.
"You're alright, Winston."
The gorilla freezes. He sets the soldering iron down slowly, he takes off his glasses, and slowly, he looks up at Reyes' brown eyes, and strangely, they are at the same height as his are. The corner of Reyes' mouth threatens to smile, but it never comes. Winston is free of his armor's burden for one moment, and it feels so liberating he doesn't quite know what to say. This is as close to any form of acceptance Reyes has ever shown him, and the last time it will ever be shown, but it happened, and they both know, and they will both remember. Reyes still always thought Winston was beneath him, but now that margin was smaller, at least in Winston's mind.
They share a nod, and then Reyes is gone.
Gabriel Reyes was a hard man, but he was not without love. He hated weakness, and never showed any. Sometimes his cruelty knew no bounds, and other times he would risk his neck in a firefight to pull a child out of the line of fire before killing everyone shooting at him. But the world he knew was a hard world to live in. He was what circumstance made him; Morrison got Overwatch, he got Blackwatch. Before that, the two weren't so different. And so for him to let Winston into that hard world, to trust him enough to acknowledge he belonged...
Jack Morrison and Gabrel Reyes both died when the Swiss Watchpoint went up. The leading theory was sabotage, and conspiracies abound as to culprits. Reyes is one of the names. Winston hopes it isn't true, but he isn't an idiot either. Athena was able to find the footage a security camera in the Watchpoint had captured deep inside some ancient Overwatch drive, with Reyes and Blackwatch trading shots with Morrison and an Overwatch security detachment. Everyone was hit, the room hardly recognizable as a lobby, but when the flash from the bombs came, Morrison and Reyes were still fighting. Winston has asked why a thousand times, but dead men tell no tales.
Jack's empty casket was laid down in a tomb in Arlington after a parade. Winston was there, with all of Overwatch. Gabriel's empty casket was buried in Camp Pendleton quietly, only those who knew him, if they could bear coming, in the procession. Winston didn't... couldn't... go.
The shield still won't cooperate, so Winston heads to Athena's interface.
"What are all of their statuses?" he asks.
It's a habit of his, to check up on the others. Athena can access any news database, and not many servers or archives are out of her reach. The Petras Act may prohibit him from seeing them in person, but he can see them on his computer screen.
One by one, they show up on the monitor. Angela is still doing medical work in the third world; this week, it's Iraq, and she's with Doctors Without Borders. Genji is still in Nepal with the Shambali; Winston wonders what Mondatta's death did to him. Jesse is drifting America and Reinhardt is drifting Europe. Torbjorn is at home in Sweden with his wife and children, enjoying retirement, and Lena is still fighting to make the world a better place with her fiance, Emily, in London.
At least she had responded to his recall so far. But even then, communications were sporadic; she had committed, but the situation was still delicate, and he couldn't ask her to drop everything and move back to Gibraltar at a moment's notice. Illegal, immoral, illogical.
He wants to see them all. He wants with everything he has to just see them again.
The Petras Act. Winston never thought a paper cut would hurt him so badly. He's been cursing the UN legislators ever since the bill was even proposed. He lost everything when it was signed. He lost everyone.
But then, three more show up on the monitor. Winston squints at the icons.
Jack Morrison- Last Known Location: Giza, Egypt
Gabriel Reyes- Last Known Location: Giza, Egypt
Ana Amari- Last Known Location: Giza, Eqypt
"Athena, what's this?" he asks.
Athena thinks for a moment.
"Analysis indicates the individuals in question have been detected in the respective locations," she says.
Winston stares at the monitor for a minute before he speaks again.
"Show the identification evidence."
More amateur footage pops up on the screen, a firefight inside some compound in Egypt. Athena's algorithms analyze the three's posture, fighting styles, armament, anything and everything up to facial recognition and hypothetical restructuring. Her conclusion: the three fighting are the ghosts Winston has been talking to.
Winston is floored. He thinks for an hour, about his dead friends that he is watching try to kill each other in a compound in Egypt. He stares at the screen until his eyes water.
"Athena, pull up available footage of the vigilantes, Soldier 76 and Ghost, and the mercenary, Reaper."
More footage, more conspiracies, more tidbits of the Ghost and the Soldier 76 and the Reaper Athena flashes in front of him, and the more it makes sense. The hits on Talon and Vishkar, the AO's, the assets, the disdain in the Reaper's voice when he called him monkey. Maybe they are alive.
His hope is outweighed by logic, but not by much. As he walks the halls until dawn, he thinks to himself if they can really be alive. And if so, how?
The sun comes up, and he is no closer to an answer.