Chapter Text
Jack’s head pounds in a dull rhythm as he squints at the flier in his hands, struggling to read the tiny letters. His eyes dart around the paper before coming back to settle on the first line, as if the words are making things difficult for him on purpose and if he can just catch them off guard, he’ll be able to read them before they melt away. Unfortunately, he has no such luck and the strain of it only makes his brain scream more insistently at him to stop.
Cursing under his breath, he throws the paper down onto the table and starts searching every nook and cranny of the living room. Gabriel walks in on him the moment he starts throwing the couch cushions onto the floor.
“Oh, is it pillow fort time?” Gabriel asks with a toothy grin. “Damn, why didn’t you tell me?”
Jack’s response is to throw a pillow directly at his face.
Unfazed, Gabriel carefully sets the pillow aside and leans over to observe. “What are we doing here?”
“Lost my fucking reading glasses,” Jack grumbles as he continues taking apart the couch. When he overturns the last cushion to no avail, he hisses “fuck” and pushes it back into place with decidedly more force than necessary.
Gabriel chuckles as he begins helping pick up the pillows tossed haphazardly around the room. “You need reading glasses? How old are you?”
“I got stabbed in the face with a piece of shrapnel and it fucked up my short-range vision, give me a fucking break,” Jack snaps.
“Oh.”
Gabriel falls silent. There’s a tension in the air as they begin replacing the cushions on the couch, but Jack’s head still feels like it’s being steadily hit with a mallet and he isn’t in the mood to do anything about it.
“I’ve never seen you wearing them,” Gabriel pipes up after a while of searching the room aimlessly. “The glasses.”
“They make me look like a grandpa,” Jack grunts. He kneels to check under the coffee table. “Or worse, my dad,” he amends after some thought.
Gabriel hums and moves to search the kitchen. They manage to work in silence for a few seconds, until Jack tries to stand up and slams his knee into the edge of the coffee table. He curses violently at it, and he can hear Gabriel cracking up from the other room.
Before Jack can yell at him to shut up, Gabriel calls out, “Found ‘em!” He moves to stand in the kitchen doorway, holding up the pair of bright red glasses, eyes sparkling victoriously. “They were by the microwave.”
Jack groans as he gets up and goes to snatch his glasses back. “Of course they were. Can never fucking read the print on food packaging.”
He returns to the table and puts them on, heaving a sigh as he finally gets to read the flier that had been left on his doorstep. Unsurprisingly, it contains completely inconsequential information about some fair the local high school is putting on. Decidedly not worth the effort.
Gabriel is still hovering, so Jack puts the flier down and gives him an insincere, “Thanks,” hoping it will send him away.
It is to no avail. Gabriel just shrugs and smiles. “If those glasses make you look like your dad, I’d have to say your dad is a pretty handsome fella.”
“He’s dead,” Jack says without missing a beat.
Gabriel flushes and clears his throat, glancing down. “Oh. Uh, sorry to hear that.”
Jack waves him off, folding up the flier and standing to deposit it in the wastepaper basket. “Doesn’t matter. Look, I’ve got a combine harvester that needs a check-up so if you’re not too busy…” His tone is acid, clearly broadcasting the end of the conversation.
Gabriel gets the message this time and nods. “Right. Yeah. Sorry.” He turns his back to go and there’s something sad about the slope of his shoulders that gives Jack pause.
“Uh-“ Jack surprises himself when he speaks up. Gabriel looks back and as their eyes meet, Jack gets the feeling he missed an opportunity somewhere in this interaction. “Thanks,” he says, a little rushed but genuine this time, trying vainly to salvage the moment.
There’s a faint impression of a dimple at the corner of Gabriel’s mouth, a crinkle around his eyes, and he nods. Jack nearly asks him to wait a moment, but he doesn’t know what he would say after that so he lets it go.
Once he’s alone again, he immediately regrets that decision.
“Is the ship repaired yet?” Gabriel asks at dinner. He seems antsy as he picks at his broccoli, looking between the members of his strike team for an answer.
“She’ll be ready when she’s ready,” Torbjörn assures him.
“Plenty of time to get things done in the meanwhile,” Ana adds, sending a meaningful glance Jack’s way.
Gabriel narrows his eyes at them. “Do I really need to remind you that we have a war to win and no more time to waste?”
“Then we had all better get our asses in gear,” Ana teases.
Jack continues to pretend he doesn’t know what they’re talking about and innocently asks Liao to pass the salad dressing.
Jack is collecting chicken eggs when Gabriel approaches him the next morning.
“Uh, hey.” Gabriel’s smile is uncharacteristically meek. He gives Jack a little wave, but when he doesn’t get one back, he puts his arm down.
“What?” Jack asks, refocusing on his task.
“Just wanted to say I’m sorry. About yesterday. Bringing up a bunch of things you didn’t want to talk about.” Gabriel takes a small breath. “The ship is probably going to be done by tomorrow night, so I think we’ll be leaving the next morning. I didn’t want to leave things… awkward.”
That makes Jack pause. He turns his gaze to Gabriel’s face and tries not to acknowledge the mild satisfaction he gets out of the way their eyes seem to always magnetize to each other. “You’re leaving the day after tomorrow?”
“Probably.” A bit of the tension in Gabriel’s shoulders fades. “That week sure went by quickly, huh?”
Jack nods, studying Gabriel’s face a little longer. “I see.”
Just as he’d known all along. Gabriel is going to walk right out of his life and never come back. After this week, they would never see each other again.
“Anyway…” Gabriel rubs the back of his neck. “No hard feelings?”
He’s a dead man walking, Jack reminds himself. Gabriel is going to go off to war and will surely get mowed down by a Bastion in some desolate warzone, or perhaps sacrifice himself for some terrified children.
This is the end.
“Yeah,” Jack says. He smiles as bright as he can despite how it makes the muscles in his face ache, carefully noting the way Gabriel’s mouth falls open just a bit in understated awe.
Soon, he’ll be alone again.
“Does this apology cover the part where you called me handsome?” he asks.
Gabriel stands a little straighter, like he’d been given a static shock. “I… If you wanted it to?”
Jack makes a show of thinking it over, tapping his index finger against his lips and frowning. “Hmm. Well, did you mean it?”
Gabriel swallows visibly, the tips of his ears hot pink. “Yeah.”
“Good.” Jack smirks. “Don’t take it back then.” He returns his attention to the chickens and casually adds, “You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Thanks,” Gabriel replies dumbly. “Uh. I have to go check in with my team so…” By the time Jack nods in acknowledgement, he had already fled.
Jack sighs as he puts the basket down, dropping his smile immediately. He rubs at his cheeks, trying to massage out the faint twinge of pain. He’d often heard as a child that it was dangerous to maintain the same expression for too long or his face could get stuck that way. He’d always scoffed at such an idea, but now that he’s been trying to smile again after years of impassiveness, he’s beginning to think there might be some truth to it.
Gabriel didn’t seem to notice, anyway. It had been a long time since he’d flirted with anyone, but Gabriel was so painfully obvious about his interest that Jack’s lack of practice didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Hell, it had been a long time since Jack had spoken to other human beings regularly and even that didn’t put Gabriel off at the beginning, so maybe it was unsurprising.
It was all so easy. Maybe that’s what settles like a weight in Jack’s stomach, uncomfortably warm and slimy. Gabriel is easy. Easy to talk to, easy to be around, easy to care about…
Easy to lose, Jack thinks fiercely. Gabriel is leaving and never coming back. He’s going to slip through Jack’s fingers and die on some battlefield and Jack won’t even know.
He wonders, not for the first time, if it would be worth having some harmless fun before he’s left alone again.
Jack glares at his bedside alarm clock, daring it to go on to the next minute. Unfortunately, being an inanimate object, it doesn’t appear to be intimidated and continues counting the seconds anyway. He tries shutting his eyes briefly and then opening them again to see if it makes any difference, but no, the clock ticks on with or without him.
It hits midnight and he shoves his thin blanket aside to sit up. Usually he can tune it out, but tonight, the incessant tapping of the second hand is grating. His insides feel tight and antsy, squirming restlessly such that any random sensation is bound to grind on his nerves.
His room is too small, too hot and stuffy in the dark. He gets the distinct impression that it’s more cluttered and cramped than he remembers it being when he first laid down. There’s no way he’s gong to be able to sleep in this state.
He resists the urge to kick something as he shoves some pants on and makes his way downstairs. His plan was to hang out in the living room, maybe watch some television until he’s tired enough to pass out, but as soon as he gets there he remembers that Liao is currently occupying the couch since he drew the short straw when they were deciding sleeping arrangements.
Jack resolves never to let people crash on his couch again as he tiptoes outside.
Something eases up under his skin the moment he steps into the fresh air, like the knot in his stomach slowly uncoils with every breath. He doesn’t bother putting on shoes as he walks into the grass. The tiny blades between his toes are an anchor as he cranes his neck to look up.
The sky stretches out above him, vast and positively cluttered with stars. The moon is merely a sliver in the distance, allowing the stars to shine brightly without any competition. It’s dizzying, the sheer size of it all quite simply beyond human comprehension.
“Jack?”
Gabriel’s voice brings him down to earth as he lowers his gaze back to eye-level. It’s dark and his weak eyesight makes it difficult to discern details, but that’s definitely Gabriel standing a few feet in front of him.
Gabriel grins and the flash of white teeth is a little blinding. “What are you doing out here?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Jack says. “You?”
“Same here.”
They wordlessly sit next to each other in the grass, Gabriel with his legs stretched out and leaning back on his hands behind him, Jack with his knees pulled to his chest and his hands clasped around his ankles.
“There’s so many,” Gabriel says, voice low and reverent. “I don’t think I’ve seen this many stars in my whole life.”
Jack hums an acknowledgement. “Light pollution must be a bitch in LA.”
Gabriel laughs softly and lays back, hands behind his head. “Yeah. It’s kind of humbling, seeing how big the universe is, huh.”
“Yeah.” Jack stares at the sky until his eyes start to tear up from being open for too long and he blinks the wetness away.
“Like this, you can almost forget there’s a war going on,” Gabriel murmurs.
Jack nods, even though Gabriel isn’t looking in his direction. He knows what Gabriel means. “We’re so small.”
“Yeah.” Gabriel chuckles. “It’s a little scary, isn’t it? Us humans are so self-important, but we’re really just little specks of dust floating in space.”
“It’s not,” Jack says firmly. “Scary, I mean. Being so insignificant…” He sighs and shuts his stinging eyes to give them a break, resting his chin between his knees. “Isn’t it kind of comforting? Knowing nothing matters.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know…” His brow wrinkles in thought. “Our lives are so short. We’re just tiny dots on a tiny planet hurtling through empty space around a sun that will someday die and wipe out this tiny section of the universe. And the rest of the universe is just going to keep on existing, with or without us. All the mistakes we make, all the stupid shit we do, none of it is going to matter in the grand scheme of things.”
“Huh…” Gabriel falls silent, thinking that over for a minute. “I guess I can see where you’re coming from. Puts things into perspective, so the bad stuff doesn’t feel like the end of the world.”
“Mm-hm.”
“But that doesn’t mean nothing matters.” He pauses, the gears turning in his brain practically audible. “Our lives might be small, but I have to believe that it means something. I have to believe that there are things worth fighting for, or there’s no way I can go on.”
“What’s the point?” Jack asks, looking over. He means it, too. He really wants to know.
Gabriel shakes his head. “I don’t know. But I don’t think there has to be a point. This is the only life we’ve got and we should make the most of it while we can. Find what’s important to us and protect it.” He smiles at Jack. “Isn’t it nice to know that, out of all the countless things that could have happened in this huge universe, we had the chance to live?”
The way he says it makes Jack want to believe him. He stretches out too, lying on his back to see the stars spread out above him, grasping for the hope Gabriel sees in them. He shuts his eyes and breathes deeply, taking in the gentle wind across his face and the smell of the grass, Gabriel’s faint warmth beside him.
But when he opens his eyes, the starlight is cold.
He doesn’t have anything to protect or fight for. He’s just existing, waiting for his time on this earth to end so he can become a part of the meaningless oblivion that waits for them beyond the inky-black sky. Same as the stars, born only to die burning themselves out for the sake of it. And by the time their light reaches the earth, they are already long gone.
It’s a little strange, realizing he’s looking at a field of star corpses.
“Do you believe in aliens?” he asks abruptly, just to hear his own voice, just to reaffirm his existence before he gets lost in the expanse of nothing.
“You’d have to be pretty stupid not to,” Gabriel replies. “If not right now, they definitely have – or will – exist somewhere at some point, you know? The universe is too big for us to be the only life out there.”
“Yeah. That’s what I think too.” Jack pauses to sit back up and Gabriel does too, turning his body to face him. “I’ve met one before.”
“Really?” Gabriel sounds doubtful. “What, did they come down in a flying saucer and ask to be taken to your leader?”
“Nah, they crashed in my backyard and tried to kill me,” Jack says nonchalantly.
“What?”
“Then they had the gall to sleep in my house and eat my food for a week.”
“Oh my god,” Gabriel groans.
Jack smirks. “One of them was pretty hot though.”
“Why thank you,” Gabriel says with exaggerated gratitude. “I always knew I’d make a sexy alien.”
“I was talking about Reinhardt,” Jack corrects.
Gabriel gives him a light shove. “Fuck you, man.”
“What can I say, he’s tall and his hands could fit around my whole waist.”
“What, this waist?” Gabriel’s hands come up to grasp just above Jack’s hips, giving a gentle squeeze. “No way, you’ve been eating too much cornbread.”
Jack grabs his wrists, a thrill running up his spine at the contact. “Listen, not everyone can have an inhumanly perfect hourglass figure like you.”
“You calling my figure perfect?” Gabriel asks with a suggestive grin.
Their faces are inches from each other. Jack can feel Gabriel’s breath against his lips. “From a purely objective standpoint.”
“Is that so?” Gabriel is leaning in just the slightest bit closer. “You have no personal opinion?”
Something squeezes in Jack’s chest.
He wants Gabriel to kiss him.
“Nope,” he says quickly, tearing Gabriel’s hands off him and practically knocking Gabriel over in his haste to get up. “Look, I’m supposed to be up early, I really need to get back to bed.”
“Oh.” The disappointment in Gabriel’s voice is palpable. “Okay.”
Jack hesitates, grasping for something to say. When he can’t think of anything, he turns on his heel and leaves without a second glance.
He’s perfectly calm as he walks back to his room. He shuts his door, careful not to make any noise, and crawls back under his covers. He rolls onto his front and buries his face in the pillow. He’s fine. Nothing happened.
Gabriel’s handprints burn under his clothes. He pulls his blanket around him tighter, as if to overwhelm the sensation with the near unbearable heat of his room.
He’s just lonely, he reminds himself. He’s kept his human contact to the absolute bare minimum since he came home from the army and it’s only natural that he’d be inclined to latch onto the first person who showed any sign of interest. For that matter, Gabriel is also probably desperate for some kind of connection, any kind of escape from the sheer stress of his position.
It’s not like there’s even room for anything more significant anyway, between the rapidly approaching end of the week and Gabriel’s almost certain death waiting just around the corner. This weird tension between them is just something they have to get out of their system, that’s all. They can deal with it tomorrow before Gabriel leaves, get it over with and put an end to this whole encounter forever.
Despite these self-assurances, Jack knows he won’t be getting any sleep tonight.