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There's a tiny, wandering, wisp of light floating in the woman's otherwise dark living room, and it is then that she knows her time is up.

Articles related to a mercenary's activities are scattered all over her coffee table alongside piles and piles of local obituaries. As a part of her evening ritual, she has been maintaining a list of names and crossing them out one by one, felt marker leaving inky black smudges on her fingers. With every line crossed, she is recalculating the days.

The wisp's faint glow illuminates the array of paper that it's hovering over, so she is able to see the next name on the list - a name that she no longer goes by but still haunts her after all these years. This is an eventuality that the woman has long come to accept, ever since her colleagues have begun to drop out of contact one by one.

Lost in her train of thought, she jumps a little to see that the wisp has blinked away from its position a few meters away to hover directly in front of her face. She has been caught.

The wisp begins to shake in an erratic pattern, creating blossoms of flickering lights that would be pretty if not for its implications.

From the shadow that the bright light casts, Reaper coalesces into existence. He looks more terrifying in person, the woman notes faintly. When reading the articles, you are able to laugh at the mercenary's attire as if he is nothing but a silly child gallivanting around in a terribly out of season costume. But from this distance, you can see the almost supernatural smoke pouring out from behind the creature's mask, as well as the chill that his presence brings.

If not for the woman's firm disbelief in magic and nonsense, she would almost describe the duo to be right out of a grim fairy tale.

"There you are, you irritating little fireball," Reaper says, purposefully ignoring her presence in the room to address the little wisp instead. "Finally done sulking? Ready to do your job now?"

To the woman's surprise, the wisp seems to understand this jab, and darts violently at the mercenary in response. It gains access through the creature's hood opening and swirls around the interior of the cloak, eliciting an inhuman growl from the creature.

"Get out of there! You stupid, useless..."

The mercenary, reputed for his ruthlessness, spends the next few seconds swearing up a storm as he tries to chase the wisp out of his cloak to no success. Every time that his clawed hand closes in on the thing, it zooms away to the opposite side of his body, resulting in a rather comedic sight of him flapping his arms uselessly back and forth.

"If you pull this shit one more time, I swear I'm leaving you in the lab with the dissection crew for the rest of your life!"

This... is not within the parameters of the woman's research. All indicators have suggested that the wisp is a mere manifestation of Reaper's nanite implants, controlled by the creature himself. But his difficulty in making the wisp obey confirms that the wisp is actually a separate entity with its own will.

The woman feels an urge to report her findings to the higher-ups, but then decides not to. Let them face what's coming for them. Blind loyalty is what brought her here to this perilous point in her life, and she would be a fool to put herself at more risk. Her life will end soon, but she would be betraying everything that she has fought for if she does not at least try to survive.

Unfortunately, her attempt to sneak away from the scene seems to not have gone unnoticed.

The moment that she tiptoes a few step backwards, Reaper and the wisp cease their struggle in an uncanny unison. The former turns around to stare at her, while the latter peeks curiously from its perch inside the hood.

"And where do you think you're going?"

Taking in a deep breath, she steels her nerves and tries to act unfazed. Distractions. She needs to distract them. "There are numerous personal accounts of people seeing a bright light during a near-death experience, but I didn't take it to be quite so literal."

The little wisp of light in question makes a noise that sounds like chiming bells. The darned thing is laughing at her!

"So what kind of phenomenon is this?" The woman asks, trying to stall for as long as possible. "I don't believe that a glowing orb is a common phenotypic expression that nanite implants take on, let alone one that fights against its own host's will."

Reaper tilts his head. "So you do not know either."

"Should I?"

"It's a soul globe, somehow infused with nanites to maintain its physical form long after the original body had supposedly perished. This fucker's been glued to me since I woke up one day. Dr. O'Deorain suggests that you are one of the only other scientists who is capable of such feat," Reaper pauses meaningfully, the threat heavy in his undertone. "But I see that the intel's wrong."

Dr. O'Deorain, that rat! She knew she shouldn't have trusted that geneticist. Even though they both sold their soul to Talon for the sake of furthering their own research, similarity unfortunately doesn't breed camaraderie in this case. Vengeance can come later, after she bargains for her terms of survival.

"I can help with that," the woman insists. "Dr. O'Deorain may be renown for her scientific innovations, but I am far better at investigating existing phenomenon. I just need some basic equipment, and I guarantee that you won't be disappointed with the results."

Reaper laughs. "Oh, but you've disappointed me plenty already."

Alarm bells ring inside her head, screaming at her to run away as fast as she can. But in an instant, the wisp is in front of her face, fluttering and pulsing and blinding her with its radiance. Unable to see anything, she trips over a chair leg and sprawls onto the ground. The sound of footsteps, slow and leisure in their pace as they draw closer, sends a bone-deep shiver down her back.

The cock of a shotgun near her head only seals the sentence.

"Send your colleagues my regards."

"Fuck you!" she spats, finding a final surge of defiance to stare hatefully up at Death and his bizarre, wispy companion.

The woman's life may end here, but the documents she has left them will make them pay for causing her to break her promise to her children once again.

The story of how Reaper meets the wisp isn't a particularly exciting one. Before Zurich, he was human and alone. After Zurich, he is neither.

At least, that is what he told Talon when they interrogated him under the thin disguise of a job interview. When poked further, he usually becomes tight-lipped and unwilling to respond, especially since that particular set of memory is not one that he is fond of revisiting.

In truth, the circumstances surrounding the explosion is a blur to Reaper. There had been a reason for the attack, but he has trouble recalling why. Names and motivations all cloud together in the aftermath. What he remembers most vividly is the putrid taste of fear as the walls of the headquarter collapsed around him, followed by an all-consuming, scorching darkness. It was painful, but he was used to pain. He was not used to this kind of darkness.

He tried to scream, but a large block of debris had fallen over his chest, knocking the breath out of him. With neither his voice nor his sight, he was painfully helpless and alone.

Then there was Jack, the lone beacon warding away the shadow's claws. The linearity of the events surrounding Zurich may be a mystery for Reaper, but he remembers Jack.

Jack found him under the crushing weight of darkness, and spoke to him with words that he could hear but not comprehend. But even that beacon of light eventually abandoned him, left him to rot inside the gaseous ink and the monstrous buzzing inside his head, which turned out to not only be in his head but also inside every single organ of his body. His light was gone, so now there was nothing left. There was only darkness.

Gabriel Reyes was tired. He just wanted to sleep and forget everything.

But a series of chiming noises prevented him from doing so. The rhythm reminded him a little bit of the alarm clock back in his SEP days that would blare at 4 AM in the morning, loud enough to wake up the dead. The association made him growl, and he instinctively used his palms to block out the noise as he tried to go back to sleep.

Then, all of a sudden, his eyelids were assaulted by what felt like blasts of obnoxious sunlight a few inches from his face.

Gabriel finally opened his eyes to see a strange, wisp of light hovering above his head, twirling around in an oddly hypnotic pattern. When the thing noticed that Gabriel was awake, it began to vibrate like crazy, scattering light everywhere like a disco ball.

"Quit that," he muttered and batted the annoying thing away.

This only seemed to incense the wisp, as it purposefully returned and landed right on top of Gabriel's nose. When he tried to grab it, the thing danced to the top of his head, then to his left shoulder, and so on. After several attempts, he huffed in defeat.

"The hell are you? And why won't you let me sleep?"

The wisp chimed, and that was all the warning that he got before the thing smashed straight at his throat.

Feeling his temper snap, Gabriel leaped up to grab at the stupid thing. His body was slow and lethargic, but he managed to stumble forward just in time to avoid a segment of the overhead structure crumbling a few feet behind him. It was strange being able to move his body after having it crushed, but he didn't really give it any more thought in his haze of disorientation.

The wisp was unrelenting in its teasing, chiming in a way that sounded like it was laughing at him. When he tried to pounce on it again, it darted through a half-collapsed doorway. So he followed.

In Reaper's mental image of what happened after the Zurich explosion, he likes to think that his escape from the wreckage had been a matter of pure mental discipline and willpower. But in truth, he mostly got out while being egged on by a tiny wisp thing as he tripped over his own feet trying to remove the irritating little shit from existence.

That didn't exactly work as planned, so now Reaper has a strange little companion that follows him everywhere on his quest for vengeance.

In the first few months of their tentative coexistence, the two got along like a house on fire. By which he means that copious amount of property damage tend to occur when they were within the vicinity of each other, and they were within the vicinity of each other pretty much all the time. For some reason, no matter how hard Reaper attempted to chase it away, no matter how out-rightly cruel he treated it, it would always float back to him like a homing beacon.

Just to spite him, most likely.

The wisp was aloof and irritable with the temperament of an old man - not exactly the stellar example of good company. But he soon got used to its constant presence.

Although, that changed not long after Reaper went on his first mission for Talon, and the wisp left his side for the first time since he woke up from the explosion. Moral disagreement, perhaps. He is used to people betraying him for that particular set of reasons, but it still hurt a little when he woke up one day to find the bane of his existence gone.

Only, unlike the others, the wisp didn't stay gone.

One day while Reaper got himself surrounded with guns pointed at his head in all directions, the thing appeared out of the blues and threw itself viciously at the enemies. Of course, it got into trouble since it was so weak that a bit of wind could probably blow it away, so he ended up having to save it instead. It had harrumphed and grumbled, as if saying that it didn't need any help. But actions spoke louder than words, and he had appreciated the intent even though the thing ended up being a hindrance more than it had helped.

Reaper doesn't know the wisp's reasons for returning and the wisp hasn't made any attempt to explain itself, but there's no point denying the relief he has felt in having the wisp trail after him or hide inside his hood being a general annoyance again.

It seems that they are stuck together for better or worse, so nowadays, he just resigns himself to his fate.

Reaper doesn't trust Moira.

But in place of trust, there is an acknowledgement of shared history and the mutual understanding that the other is familiar with their own twitches and tells. So they are at an impasse, trapped by the implicit threat that the other person can destroy their plans just as easily as they can destroy the other's. In many ways, that's how peacekeeping as a whole worked for Blackwatch, so it seems like neither of they have been fully able to break out of their previous mold.

The wisp, however, is less inclined to hide its dislike for the geneticist. During their first few visits, it would put itself in front of him, vibrating and growling at her like a guard dog. It was kind of touching the way it would try to protect him with its tiny body, but he still had to put an end to the behaviour as it was interfering with their work. After hearing his explanation on the importance of these visits, it settled down a little, but would still glower at her when she gets too close.

Reaper needs Moira to monitor his body, and she needs him to further her research. It's not a relationship built on mutual trust, but it works.

Nevertheless, he still can't help but question the geneticist, even when she has little reason to lie to him. "You really sure this thing isn't just an over-sized firefly?"

The "over-sized firefly" that's perched on his shoulder vibrates a little, seemingly offended by the classification.

"How many times do you plan on asking me this question?" Moira rolls her eyes, finally looking up from the data pad that she has been fiddling with since Reaper's arrival in her lab. "As unbelievable as it is, the existence of souls is a real life, observable phenomenon proven by even the strictest methodology of science. You've even had personal interactions with human souls yourself."

"By ' personal interactions' , you mean eating them," Reaper says. "I can eat people's souls."

"A rather dramatic way to put it, but yes. The nanites are capable of breaking them down and converting them into biotic energy to recuperate your strength. Quite an eco-friendly approach, I'm sure that you would agree."

"Eco-friendly, right . But that doesn't explain why I can't swallow this thing the way I can with the souls of everyone else."

To prove his point, Reaper turns his head to take a quick bite out of the unsuspecting wisp. But instead of the nanites in his mouth swarming over the thing to break it down, the strands of soul slither harmlessly out from the cracks of his teeth, reforming back into an indignant ball of light that smacks his face in retaliation for the treatment.

"There's a built-in protocol for regulating autoimmune interactions," is Moira's dismissive reply. Seeing the other's pointed look, she sighs. "The lab results from our last session came back."

"Oh?" Reaper perks up.

Their last session together had been brutal, though less on his part and more on the difficulty of keeping a soul in confinement long enough to obtain a viable measurement out of it. But Moira had insisted, citing reasons that sounded more like a combination of curiosity and sadism than anything else.

"It's confirmed that both yours and the soul globe's nanites have the same signature, meaning that they share the same origin." Moira opens up two holograms side by side, showing a side-by-side comparison to prove her point. "I suspect that while you were unconscious during the, ah, explosion, your nanites were working overtime to reestablish homeostasis, and this soul happened to be nearby."

With the press of a button, the two holograms merge together into one large one. It appears to be simulating a process that is probably supposed to mean something, but to Reaper's untrained eyes, all it looks like is a hoard of black bees swarming around.

"Only instead of consuming it, an error presumably occurred in the machine code, and the soul was integrated into the system as an ally instead of being registered as food."

That doesn't sound like a good thing. "These errors. Do they happen often?"

"Not at all, which is what makes this case so curious. Speaking of which, have you learned anything new from your mission?"

"It was a dead end," Reaper spats, convenient leaving out the documents that he has found in that woman's house, which would require a more thorough examination at a later date.

"Then chances are that this is not somebody's machinations, but a genuine accident out of the blues. How fascinating." Moira smiles in cold delight. "Before you fainted, do you recall whether there was anyone else nearby? Or any corpses, perhaps?"

"No, I was alone."

"Are you certain? Surely there could've been -"

"I was alone ," Reaper cuts her off.

Distantly, he can feel the warmth of the wisp brush closer to his neck, but he's too overwhelmed by the spike of hatred that pierces through his chest to react to it. There had been nobody else nearby back when he was buried in the ruins of the headquarter, nobody except for Jack who had made a run for it and left him for the dead.

Fuck does it hurt, but he's good at dealing with the pain - uses it as a fine blade to sculpt himself into the monster that everyone else sees him as, a monster that he will thoroughly enjoy becoming.

"Very well," Moira says, pulling him out of his head. "Have you perhaps considered employing a simpler approach, and just ask our subject of interest?"

"Think I haven't tried?" Reaper tilts his head to glare at the wisp. "This little fucker wouldn't cooperate no matter what I bribe it with."

The wisp chimes innocently.

"Yes you. Don't even pretend that you don't understand what we're saying."

Another chime.

"Surely there's some sort of signaling system that we can establish in order to make communication easier." Moira leans forward. "What do you currently do to communicate with it?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? That's rather inefficient, don't you think?"

Reaper shrugs. It doesn't seem like something of priority, especially since the wisp is so easy to read. The other hasn't expressed any particular desire to verbally speak with him either, so he's personally fine with the status quo.

Moira seems puzzled, but she continues. "We can try morse code, for example. Or if it doesn't know Morse code, simply spelling out letters in the air would work too."

Without a pause, the wisp blinks out a pattern of dots and dashes. N O .

Reaper gives her a look, as if to say, See? Look what I have to work with here.

"So you do know morse code. That certainly makes things easier. Would you care to tell us your name, gender, and occupation? I cannot promise anything, but there's a higher chance of restoring you to your original self after knowing your identity."

N O .

"Fair enough. At the very least, can you confirm that you used to be human before taking on this form?"

A pause, then N O .

"Is that a no for ' no, you cannot confirm' , or ' no, you were not human' ?"

N O .

Reaper interrupts. "It's not going to signal anything other than no . Hell, I doubt it even knows any of the other alphabets."

F -

He flicks the wisp away right before it finishes the final dash for U . In retaliation, it zaps him right back.

Lips thinning, Moira interrupts before their fight can escalate. "Right. I see now that this is just a grand waste of time. Unless you are willing to leave the subject with me so that I can examine it in more detail, I suggest that you take your little circus show elsewhere."

Like the ghost of a tickle beside him, Reaper feels the wisp flicker uncertainly at those words, but when he glances at the little fireball, it quickly returns to its typical unfazed attitude. His lips twitch a little at such an obvious act.

"Maybe next time," he says.

Whatever the wisp is - he's still betting on over-sized sentient firefly - it doesn't deserve to fall under the hands of Moira, not in the same way that he had.

In combat, Reaper and the wisp move together with a fluidity that is a stark contrast to how their typical daily interactions go. As if able to read his mind, the wisp can follow up on his attacks and cover for his weak spots like an age-old partner instead of a new companion.

While it has appeared reluctant to kill at first, lately it's been following Reaper's lead more often than not, and has even started helping him secure some targets.

Good. Morality is nothing but a dead-weight in their current occupation.

As partners, it is important to learn what each other is capable of, though the wisp flutters in a way that looks like an eye roll when he demonstrates his most powerful move - the death blossom. Drama queen is probably what it's calling him inside its head, along with various mental utterances of young whippersnappers and back in the old days we didn't need to do flashy moves to shoot people dead .

Reluctantly, the wisp also demonstrates a few of the things it can do. For one, it seems to have some degree of control over the brightness of its glow, so it can shine light into an enemy's face to distract them. Another thing it can do is make annoying chiming noises, which Reaper supposes might be able to confuse an enemy into thinking that their phone is ringing.

There had been an enemy who mistook the wisp for a giant mutant bug and had screamed bloody murder as the wisp chased him around. But they probably shouldn't count on that as an advantage.

The wisp can also electrocute people, though the voltage is low enough that it feels more like the kind of static electricity you get from touching metal doorknobs in the winter while wearing a wool scarf. However, in terms of interactions with the material world, the wisp is severely lacking.

According to Moira's explanation, soul substance does not behave like most matter, and as such, has little ability to physically affect the world without a facilitator. The facilitator in this case would be nanites. It takes a few rigorous training sessions - by which Reaper means a few sessions that he spends laughing at the wisp as it tries to propel a pebble at his head - but the hard labour eventually bears fruition. The wisp gains a better control over using nanites to move objects, while Reaper gains a big lump on his forehead.

As far as offensive capabilities go, the wisp seems to prefer to throw itself at the enemies like a projectile. The impact doesn't hurt them very much, but most people are perplexed enough by the vicious little thing that it serves as a distraction for Reaper to sweep in and clear the flock. While recklessly lobbing your own soul at your foes as a weapon doesn't seem like a particularly healthy nor sane thing to do, Reaper is able to appreciate how ridiculously metal it makes his companion sound.

There appears to be some sort of shared swarm intelligence going on between their nanites, because whenever the wisp gets into trouble - and it gets into trouble all the time - a portion of the nanite cloud surrounding Reaper would depart to encapsulate it and shield it from harm. So he's not particularly worried about the little guy getting hurt.

The only issue they've ever had is verbal communication, as with every other relationship in his past life sadly.

Generally, Reaper's preferred way to address the wisp ranges from "little shit" to "stupid firefly".

The wisp's preference is very much not the same, and it objects to this vocally .

One time, when there's a sniper and Reaper says "duck, you stupid firefly" only to receive a sharp jab in the stomach for his effort, he decides that enough is enough.

"Okay. You need a name," he says, arms crossed. The mask is covering his frown, but he likes to imagine that it gives him even more of a menacing look when he stares down the little fireball. "No, you don't get to complain. It's your own fault for being a stubborn fuck and not telling me your real name when I asked. So I'm giving you a name, and you're just gonna have to deal with it."

The wisp considers this, then bobs up and down in reluctant agreement.

Reaper has mulled very hard over this in order to come up with a moniker that matches with his own aesthetics. His companion better appreciates it. "Then how about Phantom? Or Specter?"

It's amazing how judgmental a ball of soul substance can look, in spite of having no face or body to work with.

"You have no taste," he sighs.

It then occurs to Reaper that, as viciously grumpy as the wisp may be, perhaps it would would prefer a cuter name instead of a badass one. Proud of having found a likely solution to the problem, he blurts out the first thing he thinks of that perfectly reminds him of the being - "Cotton candy."

- And gets smacked by the wisp who very much doesn't feel like cotton candy on impact.

The brainstorming carries over from mission to mission. Reaper continues to call out names that earn him judgmental responses from his companion, while the wisp seems to be increasingly desperate in trying to ignore his existence.

The stalemate only ends during a firefight, when the wisp stops mid-combat to hover over one of the casualties. There's a glint of silver on the corpse's neck, and upon a closer look, it becomes clear that the glint comes from a dog tag that has fallen out of the victim's jacket on impact.

The wisp seems to be mulling over something as it floats down to slowly trace over the words embedded on the dog tag. The action is not a purposeful one, as if it's trying to mimic a habit that it used to have in a body that it no longer has.

Reaper connects the dot. "Were you a soldier in your previous life?"

After a long pause, the wisp bobs up and down once.

It's the clearest response that he has ever gotten out of the wisp in all these months.

What a pair they make, two soldiers who cling so stubbornly onto this world which has brought them nothing but pain and misery. Both of them have already lost every part of their former selves, but neither are willing to embrace death - not without a fight.

Reaper's lips quirk. "Well then, c'mon Soldier, we still have another war to win."

Jack isn't anywhere, and it's driving Reaper insane.

Between Talon missions, he has been following all the news events, trying to piece together a trail that would start at Zurich and end up at where ever the fuck Jack is. There had been a casket on the television, but they had never showed the strike-commander's face. As long as Jack is alive, the stubborn idiot isn't someone who would just give up like that and leave the responsibility of fixing the world to someone else. That means there has to be a lead somewhere.

He's been scrolling through news reporting of vigilante activities, trying to find a connection. It shouldn't be this difficult; after all, Jack has never been very good at stealth. But every lead he follows ends up turning out to be a dead end. And with each dead end, his heart grows colder.

The wisp - Soldier - is getting impatient with him for refusing to explain the purpose of all the random trips it has been dragged along to, but how can he explain the importance of Jack to someone else when he doesn't even understand it himself?

Jack is everywhere inside his head, and it's driving Reaper insane.

Often from the corner of his eyes, he thinks he sees a blur that resembles the tail end of a blue coat. But when he turns around, it's only the wisp there, blinking in confusion at his sudden movement. Every night when he sleeps, he always dreams of smoke and darkness and pain and Jack. In those dreams, he screams himself hoarse commanding the other man to stay, to not leave him alone in the all-encompassing darkness, but either his voice doesn't work or the other doesn't hear him. In his worst nightmares, Jack would turn around and smile at him, cruel and ugly and rotten in a way that makes him jolt awake in cold sweat.

Tonight is one of those nights, and Reaper awakens from his dream, heart pounding rapidly enough that it feels like it would burst out of his chest. He shoots up, dislodging the wisp that's hovering over his face and sending it catapulting across the room.

Something white and fluttery falls from his shoulder, and he instinctively holds out his hand to catch it. For a moment, he fails to comprehend what he's looking at. It's... a piece of tissue paper? He looks beside him to find a pile of balled up tissue paper, as well as the half-empty box that has somehow migrated from the table to his bedside.

Realization strikes, and he wipes his eyes furiously, trying to destroy the remnants of his tears even though the evidence that the other has already seen them is right beside him.

Soldier floats over to him without uttering a sound, not even to snap at him for accidentally throwing it across the room. It lays down to rest in the juncture between his neck and his shoulder, its presence warm and comforting.

"I hate him." The words slip out. He expects to experience some sort of catharsis for finally putting that sentiment into words, but instead, it leaves him feeling even more hollow than before. Maybe if he says it enough, that would make it real. " I hate him. "

There are no context to his proclamation, but the wisp seems to understand anyways because it makes a hum of agreement.

Reaper despises feeling vulnerable, but he feels the need to say the words out loud anyways. "Don't you fucking dare leave me."

Soldier chimes.

They fall into into a comfortable silent after that, as Reaper slumps down again, slowly relaxing in the warm presence of his companion. With its luminosity so close to his face, the darkness that so often captures his mind doesn't come. Just as he is about to drift off, he hears something peculiar.

At first, it sounds a little like Soldier is having the soul globe equivalent of a seizure, and it makes Reaper concerned for all of the five seconds it take for him to realize that it is actually trying to sing a lullaby.

In a really out of tune way, but it's definitely singing.

When he bursts out laughing, the wisp is startled into falling off the bed. Once it recovers, it blinks rapidly in confusion before seemingly having realized the cause of his laughter. Very visibly, its glow changes into a light shade of pink that he has never seen before. It makes a harrumph of a chime and darts to hide behind the window curtain.

Reaper spends the next thirty minutes apologizing and trying to coax the embarrassed little fireball out from hiding, his previous nightmare long forgotten and replaced with occasion bouts of snickers that he fails to hold back.

(Though if he is honest with himself, the reason that he clings so desperately onto the belief that Jack has betrayed him is because it implies that Jack is still out there somewhere, and not inside that stone-cold casket on the television, surrounded by flowers that are a little too bright and politicians who do nothing else but lie.)

In the next few weeks, Reaper tries to be a little more cordial to the wisp by explaining why he is taking on all these missions - a little more method to his madness as he prefers to call it.

Immediately after the explosion, Reaper had been lost and angry, wanting to make someone suffer the same way that he was suffering on the inside. Nowadays, he has better control over his hatred, so he channels it into taking down all the corrupt fools inside Overwatch who have betrayed them.

Talon's time will eventually come too, but he's personally relishing the idea of an internal takeover to remodel the organization to fit his own purpose, a taste of their own medicine so to speak. Such an attempt would no doubt require years of planning, but he has nothing else but time on his hand after the nanites have slowed down his ageing. It helps that he has mentally placed Jack's name closer to the end of his list rather than the beginning. He can breathe easier, knowing that he still has tons of names to cross out before having to deal with the ghost of his past.

In exchange for his sudden transparency, Soldier has also started becoming a little more receptive towards helping him further his goals. Whoever the wisp is, it must have had experience with running missions as well as have a deep-seated resentment towards Talon, likely carried over from his previous life. A Overwatch agent assigned to the Zurich branch, perhaps? Though based on its ruthlessness and quick temper, perhaps Blackwatch would have been a better fit.

Here are the two facts that Reaper knows with certainty:

The wisp used to be a soldier.

And it absolutely despises any inquiry towards its previous life.

Whenever Reaper tries to bring up anything remotely related to its identity in conversation, Soldier would always wander away lazily as if it hasn't heard him, even though no one is really fooled by its ridiculous act.

If Reaper pushes hard enough, the wisp would start making noises that sound like the wind chime equivalent of growling and grumbling. It's hilarious how much grumpiness it can contain in such a tiny body. But he tries not to go too far, or else it would start retaliating in increasingly petty ways such as hiding his boots in the morning.

Best not poke the hornet's nest is his new policy, after having to chase a pair of floating boots half way across the Talon base at one point.

Unfortunately, the wisp seems to be reticent even about certain topics beyond the issue of its identity.

A few times in a rare bout of honesty, Reaper tries to tell his companion about Jack, but Soldier seems to be allergic to emotional connection in general, save for a few strange moods. Whenever he starts talking about Jack, it would turn pink and dart away to some remote corner of the room, suddenly finding the mold growing on the wallpaper there increasingly fascinating.

"Do you know Jack?" Reaper asks. "Is that why you make like a bat out of hell whenever I mention his name?"

True to his description, Soldier is already halfway to the other side of the room before he can finish his sentence. It blinks innocently at him, as if to say "who, me?"

"Oh drop the act. So you don't want to tell me who you are, I get it. But the least you can do is put up with it. I've had pet rocks who provide better moral support than you." He gives the wisp a wry grin. "I don't think I'm ever going to stop talking about Jack. So if we have a problem, we need to get it over with right now."

The wisp goes through several interesting shades of glow, before returning to its original colour. It seems to be gathering itself up before floating back to him. For a moment, it hovers in front of his eyes, tracing the contours of his damaged face which is maskless since they are alone. And then it pulls on his cheek. Hard.

"Ow!" Reaper hisses and leans backwards. "Is this your idea of moral support?"

Soldier bobs its body up and down in enthusiastic agreement.

"Fucked up." He snorts, unable to stay mad. "But I like it."

Soldier pulls on his cheek again.

"Alright, alright. I said I liked it, but that's enough," Reaper growls and bats the wisp away.

From there onwards, their conversation ends up devolving into their usual preferred method of communication, which involves a lot more violence and bickering.

Nevertheless, the wisp seems to have made a promise with itself at some point afterwards. Because whenever Reaper would get stuck too deep in his head, haunted by the memory of Jack, it would poke and prod him until he can focus on nothing but chasing down that stupid firefly and making it pay for annoying the fuck out of him.

(Reaper wouldn't say it to Soldier's face, but he really does appreciate the gesture even if it pains him to admit that he really needs it.)

The topic doesn't come up again until a few months later.

"But aren't you curious?" Sombra asks during one of the recon missions where they are unfortunately partnered together. "If Moira's hypothesis is correct, that soul can literally be anyone."

Reaper resists the urge to groan. "And how, pray tell, do you know about this again?"

"Once upon upon a time, a tiny bug that I planted somewhere told me something interesting," she says in sing-song tone. "About how poor little Reaper doesn't know of his cute little follower's origin."

"I don't need to."

She smirks. "No? Not even if it's someone's drone, created to spy on you and manipulated you to do their bidding?"

"It's not," he says tersely, sounding more certain than he feels.

"Aww, I'm touched. You're so trusting of your companion, even though your companion doesn't give you the same courtesy." She fake-gasps. "What if it's someone you know, Gabe? Why else does it try so hard to hide its identity?"

Reaper feels his temper snap, propelling clouds of nanites to rise up in a storm. " Do. Not. " He snarls. " Call me that. "

"Alright, alright." Sombra backs off, smiling that devious little smile of hers. "Just a little friendly warning, since we seem to have a similar goal in mind. Can't be too cautious, nowadays."

"Duly noted."

While the hacker is hard to read, Reaper does believe that she is trying to look out for him in her own obscure manner. But nevertheless, he is still inwardly pleased when the wisp trips her into a puddle of water later on.

As Sombra chases after Soldier in the background, Reaper spends his time pondering over her words.

There are several pieces of information he can garner from their conversation, which Sombra has likely intended for him to in a convoluted way. For one, she does not truly believe nor have any evidence that the wisp is a spy drone; otherwise she would have never joked about the subject and given away her opinion so freely in the presence of the wisp.

Second of all, she is purposefully letting him know that she has access to data from Moira's labs, likely by hacking into the system since both women have expressed their dislike towards each other on numerous occasions. Why she chooses to reveal so much to him, he has no idea. But he suspects it has something to do with the third piece of information: that Sombra believes they may be able to work together.

Reaper thinks she is being rather presumptuous and overconfident in her approach, though he does like her style. If things go well, he may very well obtain a powerful ally in the future, but trust will be a difficult obstacle to conquer from both sides.

Unlike other people, it's easy to trust Soldier. He can make up explanations and reason it away all he wants, but it's something less logical and more of a feeling, deep down in the core that makes up who he is.

Reyes had never being a particularly trusting person, and now as Reaper, he is even less so. But somehow at some point, the little wisp has wormed its way past his defences and slotted into a tiny well-fitting corner of his heart. It helps that Soldier's entire body is practically a mood ring with changing colours, making it difficult to hide anything from his eyes or to deceive him. He admires the wisp for being able to remain so defiant even as its own soul is laid bare to the world, for refusing to back down in spite of the stacked odds against enemies many times larger than it.

Unwittingly, he finds himself charmed by its contrary mannerism juxtaposed to its tiny body, as well as its spiteful but oddly endearing approach to self-expression.

"Well, I'm done here. See you later! Don't let the surveillance bugs bite!"

With a wink, Sombra parted ways with them after the mission, leaving them to walk to their safe house on their own.

The town is quiet, its residents long asleep in the late hours so they are alone on the street. The moon and stars are out, a beautiful sight to behold after all the bloodshed. But instead, Reaper finds himself looking at Soldier - who is no less prettier than the stars - in contemplation. Although unintentional, Sombra does bring up a decent point that he has never thought about before.

The wisp chimes, the tone inquisitive.

"I'm just thinking. You don't want to be who you were anymore, do you?"

Just like how he prefers to cast his past life as Gabriel Reyes away, perhaps the wisp also has a few skeletons in its closet. It would explain how touchy the subject is, much like how he overreacted when Sombra called him by his former name. It could also be the case that they had known each other in their previous lives, and that it is trying to hide the fact. But he finds that he doesn't really care, given their current circumstances and his own new identity. All he needs to know is whose side the wisp is on, and actions tend to matter more in that regard.

Soldier's silence is more telling than any words can be.

"I don't give a damn who you used to be," Reaper says. "And I won't ask about it anymore."

The wisp is motionless, seemingly frozen by his words. After a moment, he decides to continue walking in order to give the other some space.

Later on, Soldier catches up and floats back to its usual perch on his shoulder. Whatever he said, it seems to have struck a chord with the wisp, because this time it unconsciously snuggles a little closer to his neck, its aura suspiciously dim and shaky.

Weeks turn into months, and eventually two years have passed since the explosion that took everything away from Reaper.

Their routine begins to stabilize after a while as they start to climb the dangerous and convoluted ranks of Talon's infrastructure, establishing key connections and gaining information that will be useful for their future initiatives. In their downtime, he still keeps an eye out for Jack, who has remained elusive despite all instincts telling him that it shouldn't happen. Though for the most part, they spend their spare time crossing names off the list and raiding abandoned Overwatch bases for more information.

Walking down the hallway of the Gibraltar watchpoint is a dizzying trip down the memory lane. He lets the wisp wander away as he slowly retraces a familiar path that he has walked many times a lifetime ago.

Every nooks and crannies of the place trigger a new memory for him to behold. This stain on the ground came from Gerard dropping an extremely expensive bottle of wine. That dent on the table originated from the misadventures of their newer recruit, Oxton, who liked to dash around the base at break-neck speed.

His clawed fingers trace a barely visible crack on the wall, which came from Fareeha tripping and tumbling head-first towards it. He remembers the amount of tears shed as people ran around, not knowing what to do until Ana returned and had to calm everyone down. Fareeha had been laughing by then, entertained by the way that the entire base bumbled about like headless chickens during the havoc.

The refrigerator Reaper just passed by is a replacement, the old one destroyed in an accident caused by Torbjorn arming it with automatic water guns after Reinhardt had eaten his snacks one too many times. Looking at the ground, he sees that the flooring here has traces of age-old footprints left behind on them, relics from from a much happier time when they used to hold monthly social events to maintain the organization's morale.

Moving outside, he is greeted by the beautiful view of the cliffside, the rocks giving off a soft warm glow in the descent of the sunset. The sound of crashing waves is a nostalgic cadence to his ears. From here, he can see the piece of boulder that had been broken by Jesse and Genji, who had randomly decided to challenge each other to increasingly ridiculous competitions as time went on.

Those two's shenanigans had been legendary back in the days, with the former having an endless number of crazy ideas and the latter having an inexplicable inability to back off from any sort of challenge. They had all became good friends, bound together by the blood and sweat that they shed together on the Blackwatch missions that they undertook.

Until McCree began to question his decisions on the field. Until Genji started to withdraw further and further. Until Moira happened. Until he started feeling creeping things in the shadows and malicious eyes on his back, and those had turned out to be more than just paranoia.

His remembrance soured, Reaper turns around to walk away. He stops right as he is about to cross the doorway, pauses, and walks backwards until he reaches a specific angle. Holding out his hands, he creates a makeshift rectangle frame with his fingers to confirm that, yes, the scene matches perfectly.

Here is where he took that photo of Jack.

It had been an awkward shot, Jack standing in front of the doorway, posing in the only way that he knew how to - which was by not posing at all. Gabriel Reyes had poked fun at him, ribbed him for his deer-in-the-headlight look whenever a camera was pointed at him outside of a press conference or an interview.

As a joke, he had put up an enlarged version of the photo on one of his office monitors, because everyone needed to "witness its magnificence". But secretly, Gabriel had liked it - liked remembering the way that Jack's cheeks would turn into this adorable shade of red as he grumbled about Gabriel's teasing.

In the present day, Reaper shivers. He has to physically shake himself out of his reminiscence, forces himself to remember how to breathe.

Idly, a part of him wonders if that photograph is still inside one of the computers inside the watchpoint, and if it would be possible to restore it. But no, he has wasted more than enough time here. Their primary objective has yet to be fulfilled, and though the base may have been abandoned, it is still possible to accidentally trigger an alarm and alert people who are remotely monitoring the place of their presence.

Speaking of which, it's been a while since he has last seen Soldier.

He closes his eyes, and focuses on the tiny tug of his nanites coming from a place close by. Due to the nanites' swarm intelligence, they instinctively gravitate towards one another. Since the wisp is also a part of the system, he essentially has a radar tracking its current location almost all the time. It's useful when they are separated on missions, as the wisp often likes to wander off into danger on its own.

Moving through another corridor, Reaper comes to a stop in front of a door. He holds out a hand, partially to steady himself and partially to physically experience the solidity of the surface pressing back. He presses his masked forehead against it, feeling the living memory hidden behind the steel structure.

This is the door that protected and isolated the highest member of Overwatch's chain of commands from the rest of the world. He remembers the earlier days when this door would always be open to him, the room's inhabitant personally coming to greet him with a quiet but toothy smile. He remembers the later days when that eventually stopped, and he had been left there standing in front of the shut door, reeling in the wake of all their vitriolic arguments and shouting.

"Fuck," he mutters. He resists the urge to furiously scrub his eyes, because it's not safe to take the mask off. Athena may have been shut down along with her security system, but the cameras are still there, connectable from the external world. They're already taking an enormous risk by being here.

Taking a deep breath, Reaper presses a few buttons to input the emergency override sequence on the keypad, unlocking the door. It's one of the old codes that had been compromised after the organization's shutdown, so it should not reveal his identity. Though he's briefly surprised that the lock hasn't changed after all these years. Then again, Jack has never made much sense with his actions.

The hallway is dark, so when the door slides open, he is temporarily blinded by the bright light emitting from the holographic displays inside the room.

"Soldier?" Reaper calls out, moving forward until his eyes adjust to the brightness and prompts him to abruptly stop in his path.

He takes in the sight - tries to interpret it. Then he tries to re-interpret. His mind is churning, frantically trying to digest the information into something that makes sense. But it doesn't, at least not in a way that doesn't open a hollow hole in the pit of his stomach that threatens to consume him whole.

Hovering in front of Jack's computer is the wisp, glowing fitfully as swirls of shadow dance around it. After a moment, he realizes that it is carefully manipulating the nanites to work as an interface between it and the machine. Thumbnails of files after files are flashing across the holographic screen and disappearing one after another, racing the loading bar that is only a few percent from completion.

He is transfixed, frozen in place as he recognizes the face in some of the thumbnails - a face that he used to see in the mirror every day in the morning.

Another tick later, the computer process finishes, and a new dialog box opens up with the text "3109 out of 3109 files has been removed - Please confirm the deletion" written across it.

Reaper's feet move first, though he himself doesn't recall giving them the command to do so. He feels like an outsider, observing his own actions as he pounces towards the desk. But by then, it's too late. The dialog box closes, along with it removing any hopes of easily undoing the deletion. Fueled by the fury bubbling in his veins, he finds himself abruptly stuffed back into his own body as he tackles Soldier to the ground, using his own nanites to trap the other in a tight hold.

The wisp flutters under his weight, but it doesn't put up much of a fight. Staring into the visage of the steady light emitting out from its body, he suddenly finds the body language of the soul globe to be foreign and difficult to read.

All this time, he has thought that it is incapable of deception with the colour of its luminescence being an easy giveaway to its true feelings, but now, he is not so sure. After all, the wisp is one of a kind in terms of its existence. Nobody, not even Moira, knows of what it is truly capable of.

Is it feeling indignant at being pinned down? Is it surprised by him? Is it panicking at having been caught red-handed? Is it laughing at him? Is it even capable of experiencing emotions?

Squeezing his eyes shut, Reaper forces himself to calm down and reassess the situation. After counting to ten, he opens his eyes again. So far, the available information he can work with is as follows:

Soldier has hacked into Jack's computer using nanites and deleted thousands of files from it. The reason for its action is unknown. The contents of these files are unknown, except for some which has thumbnails with Reyes's face on them. Furthermore, why Jack has these files on his computer is also unknown. These are the parameters that he needs to confirm in order to establish a clearer view of the picture.

For now though, what Reaper knows is that Soldier knows Jack is important to him. He still hasn't told it why nor that he believes the man to be alive, but a leap of logic is unnecessary in order to deduce that he has been trying to obtain as much information on the former strike-commander as possible. Therefore, it is knowingly obstructing his goals while pretending to aid him.

With a heavy sinking sense of sickness growing in his stomach, he realizes that it's also not out of the realms of possibility that the wisp has been sabotaging his efforts all along. How many times has he gone out on missions to obtain the whereabouts of Jack, only to have returned empty-handed? How many private databases have he raided, only to not find any hints of the information that he has been searching for? Suddenly, the other's eccentric behaviour whenever he mentioned Jack is starting to make sense.

To think he thought that maybe Jack has gotten better at hiding himself after all these years - what a joke.

"Why," Reaper growls.

Soldier has the nerve to look perplexed as it flutters within his grasp.

" TELL ME. " With a swirl of nanites, he picks it up and slams it against the nearby wall. Black clouds propel themselves up in a storm, suffocating the room with their putrid presence. "What did you delete?"

A multitude of lights flashes from the wisp, before it settles back to its neutral blue hue. It doesn't make any further noise, conveying that its mouth is sealed on this matter.

"What the fuck are you trying to hide?"

Again, no response. But it looks conflicted.

With each unanswered question, Reaper feels his dead heart shatter piece by piece. "Have you been doing this all along? Deleting, manipulating , the data from those bases that we've raided?"

This sends a jolt of surprise through Soldier's body, as it frantically shakes from side to side - or tries to, anyways. What a good little actor it is, pretending to be so oblivious in the wake of his accusations.

"What's so important about the data that you didn't want me to see?" At this point, he is mostly talking to himself, trying to work his way through this situation - trying to keep his body from breaking down entirely. "And why was my - why was Reyes's face in the thumbnails?"

To this, Soldier falls quiet. It thinks for a while, and then tries to signal something. But every time it starts to blink out a few letters, it interrupts itself with a frustrated chime and starts over again. After the fourth try, Reaper runs out of patience.

He squeezes the wisp in his claws, ignoring the hurt little noise that the other makes. Slowly, he brings it closer to his eye level, and says softly, "I don't deal well with betrayal."

Reaper doesn't wait to look at Soldier's response as he storms out of the base with it tightly imprisoned in his grasp. He doesn't want to look at Soldier at all anymore.

The lab door is only a few feet in front of Reaper, but the distance feels like an ocean away.

In his head, voices are screaming, some sounding like hysterical cries while others more like barking laughter. Jack knew, one of the whispers tells him. Jack has data files on your experiment stored inside his computer. He knew what you were going through - he approved of it! He has been working with Talon all along, working with Moira to destroy your humanity, to turn you into a walking corpse!

Another whisper tells him that he doesn't have enough evidence for those accusations, but reason becomes drowned out in the fury that has completely taken hold of him. Jack has betrayed him, and now, the wisp has too.

Soldier tries to signal something to him, but he tells himself not to look - not to lose focus. Liars will only spin more lies once they get caught. He has nothing left to say to a liar.

Only, he can't help but peek at the wisp from the corner of his vision.

In their trip back from Gibraltar, Reaper had kept the wisp in a tight grip, fearing that it would run away after having its true nature revealed. But no such thing happened. If anything, the thing had only decided to float even closer to him, seemingly remorseful in a way that tugs at his heart strings. Even now, it is hovering only a few inches away, in spite of his numerous threats of physical harm.

Soldier is shaking slightly. Nervous, he thinks. But mostly worried. Not about itself, since it never cares about the kind of insane situation it gets into. But worry... for someone else?

No. Reaper quickly corrects himself. He can't be trusted to interpret the other's body language right now. For all he knows, the other has been playing him like a fiddle all along, while he tricks himself into believing that it is thinking what he wants it to think.

Soldier chimes.

"Shut up," Reaper growls, telling himself once more that the concern laced in its voice is nothing but his own treacherous imagination at work.

Steeling himself, he enters the laboratory. Moira is on the far side, partially obscured by a partition with a series of complex diagrams pinned onto it. She leans over the partition to look at her unexpected guests. Something about his demeanor must have pleased her, because she brightens upon seeing him.

It's the single-most terrifying thing that he has ever seen.

"Ah, if it isn't my favourite test subject." She grabs an office chair and rolls it over to him. "Take a seat. What can I help you with in this dreary morning?"

Reaper takes a brief glance at the chair and is about to sit down, but an echoey growl causes him to pause.

"Do you have an objection to being in my lab?" Moira addresses the wisp, looking at it in mild amusement. "You needn't worry. Apart from the boogeyman himself, there is no other creature in here that eats souls for a living."

"Very funny. You're a real clown." Reaper rolls his eyes.

"Perhaps it is true," Moira ponders thoughtfully. She is definitely in a chipper mood, to even play along with what she would usually consider to be a dreadful waste of time. "There are many occasions where children have cried upon seeing me, though I have always assumed that it was because they didn't like flu shots. Now never mind that, what brings you here? Finally decided to allow me to modify your genetics? There are some interesting new... features of my research that I wouldn't mind testing out."

What's interesting for the geneticist is a very broad category, akin to a lottery where even the winning ticket comes with tiny caption texts. Her definition of interesting ranges from growing a third arm right on top of your forehead to having your left foot's big toe decrease in length by one micrometer.

"Kind of you, but-" Right when Reaper is about to sit down again, the wisp suddenly darts at him and tries to push him out of the room.

It has a surprising amount of strength, by which he means that it is using the force of an irate goose instead of its typical cotton candy power. He struggles with it for a bit, more out of curiosity to see how much stronger it can become than anything else. But after a few moment, the wisp drifts down, light flickering erratically in signs of exhaustion.

"Give up already," he tells Soldier. "Your nanites are my nanites. You can't beat me."

As always, his words only ever seem to backfire when it comes to the wisp, as it flows straight for the right eye hole on his mask. Flinching reflexively, he steps backwards, only to realize his mistake a little too late as the lab doors slide shut in front of him with the wisp glowing smugly on the other side.

Reaper tilts his head.

That. Doesn't make sense.

He has come here with the objective of subjecting Soldier to all of Moira's morally dubious tests, in order to identify the origin and identity of the soul. Though not only has it not tried to run away from him - and he's intentionally given the wisp numerous chances to do so - but instead, it's been showing concerns towards him. In fact, upon hearing the geneticist's suggestion of experimenting on him, it decides to lock him out of the lab... as if trying to protect him?

Ridiculous. He shakes himself. No, there's another possibility that he should have considered. The more likely possibility is that Soldier is working in cohorts with Moira, and thus, by locking itself inside the lab like that, it is both attempting to earn his trust back as well as find the time to tell the geneticist that its cover has been blown. This will not do.

Closing his eyes, Reaper forces his nanites to break him down into smoke and reconstruct his body on the other side of the doors.

The scene that greets his eyes is not one that he expects.

Soldier, visibly tired, is hovering in front of the door, continuously making a low growl as Moira stands nearby. Its glow is even brighter than usual, as if trying to make itself look bigger than it actually is. He's often seen this happen before, when there's enemies approaching and he is too indisposed to take care of them himself. The wisp has saved him numerous times by distracting the enemies this way.

Moira, on the other hand, doesn't appear to be particularly bothered by the other's hostility. Instead, she is intensely focused on jotting notes down on a datapad. Every once in a while, under her breath, she'd mutter, "marvelous," as if having come across some novel and fascinating findings.

"What," Reaper says, "are you doing?"

Moira doesn't take her eyes off from her notes. "Welcome back. Your friend refused to let me open the door for you. Fortunately, it appears that you are able to get back on your own."

The wisp darts between them, seemingly intent on warding her away. She pokes the wisp with her pen, and receives a tiny zap from it. "Ow. That hurts." She returns to furious note-taking. "How fascinating."

She pokes it again, earning herself another zap.

Reaper takes it back. There's no way that Moira and Soldier have met each other before he has brought the wisp to her. Moira hates appearing anything less than sophisticated, so the only reason she would act this way is because she's so caught up in her own excitement of examining a new specimen that she doesn't notice anything else.

Another dead end then, but perhaps his visit needn't be a waste of time. There's still his original objective, of allowing the geneticist to perform all the tests she wants on the wisp. Even if the experiments themselves result in no new information revealed, it may be tortured enough to finally spill the beans.

Yes, that's what he should do - the words echo in Reaper's head just as Moira reaches for the tiny soul globe. Soldier is severely exhausted and a little droopy. But nevertheless, it still tries to escape from her grasp, though to no avail. Having depleted all of its energy in its prior struggles, it resorts to fluttering helplessly as her fingers close around its fragile body.

"Its ability to release electric charges... perhaps it is discharging the energy stored in the nanites' cells?" Moira mutters to herself, as she looks absently at the wisp struggling in her grasp. "If we run it through high electrical current, there's a chance that the nanites can take on new configurations, and dissociate from -"

"No, that won't be necessary."

Without thinking, Reaper snatches Soldier back from her grasp. Once freed, it quickly darts inside his hood. He feels the brief tickle of a shivering ball at the back of his neck, and protective instincts takes over him. He doesn't know why, but he feels strangely possessive and more than a little agitated. How dare she grab the wisp like that, as if it belongs to her?

Moira stares at him briefly, and then shrugs. "Quite attached, aren't you? And here I thought you two were fighting, given that little scuffle earlier."

"We are," Reaper says frostily. He halfheartedly tries to tug Soldier out from the back of his hood, but it refuses to budge. After feeling another shiver come from the tiny wisp, he gives up. "But the thing uses my nanites. Therefore it's mine. Nobody gets to pick on what's mine, other than me."

This elicits a cold chuckle from the geneticist. "Call it whatever you'd like, if it makes you feel better. Now do you have a real purpose for this visit, or are you here just to show me these meaningless theatrics?"

"Can't I visit a co-worker every once in a while?"

Moira shakes her head. "Be glad that I am in a good mood today, or else I'd be demanding compensations for wasting my time. The door is behind you. Remember to close it as you leave."

Reaper doesn't wait for the geneticist to change her mind - lest he ends up losing an organ or two from this visit - and promptly departs from the lab.

He still feels the faint warmth of the wisp's presence in the back of his hood. It has stopped shivering, but it is still slumping down a little, letting the black fabric carry the bulk of its weight. An uncomfortable feeling settles down in his stomach, and he has to remind himself of its betrayal in order to suppress his worry.

Soldier has dug its own grave. Reaper is only reacting accordingly to its betrayal.

So why does some of the little wisp's actions and behaviour make so little sense when he envisions it as his enemy?

"Got your package." Sombra's voice emits from his communicator. "From what I've seen so far, the hard drive looks to be completely wiped - not just superficially in the file directory, which would've been a breeze to fix. No cached data. Huh, no connections to remote servers either. Seems like your friend's been pretty thorough."

"Ex-friend," Reaper growls, still feeling sour.

"Your ex then," she corrects herself - which is, by the way, a blatant misinterpretation of what he has just said. "Anyway, I'll see what I can do. No promises though." Under her breath, she mutters, " ¡Dios mío! What archaic creature owned this computer? Haven't they ever heard of making backups?"

A chuckle is drawn out from Reaper, taking him by surprise along with the rising fondness that warms his heart. That's bona fide Jack behaviour right there, so distilled and genuine that he could just bottle it up and sell it.

The man has always preferred to do things the old fashioned way, much to the consternation of both their allies and enemies. Most of the times, it yields nothing but frustration, but every once in a while, his obtuse habits would end up inadvertently defeating villainous genius types who had based their schemes on the expectation that the strike-commander of a global peacekeeping organization would be more technologically up to date. One of the tech leads from Overwatch had quit after hearing that, citing losing grip on reality as the reason in his resignation letter.

Thinking of the perpetual warfare between Jack and the IT department, Reaper is unable to stop his lips from quirking into a smirk. Not that it matters, what with his mask there and all. "Archaic is a good description for him."

"Aww, is the big bad Reaper feeling some fondness for his ex? Never thought I'd live to see the day," Sombra teases.

He snorts, though he isn't really annoyed by it. "Shut it. The day I feel even a molecule of fondness for him would be centuries after I've buried him alive and danced on his grave."

"Huh, I take it that reconciliation hasn't been working out then?" Sombra leans closer, her face taking over the communicator screen as she squints. "Isn't that him over there? Are you keeping him in the time-out corner for being too naughty?"

Taken aback, Reaper looks over his shoulder, to the corner where the wisp is brooding. "What? Who are you talking about?"

"Your ex." She frowns. "Soldier, your ex-friend - and I'm quoting you on that term by the way. Who were you talking about?"

"My-" he chokes down his words before he can reveal anything vulnerable. "Nobody. I'm talking about nobody."

Mentally, his image of Jack is overlapped by his image of the wisp. The end result of the fusion rests uneasily in his mind, mostly because of how eerily easy they fit together.

Either not noticing his internal crisis or intentionally choosing to ignore it, Sombra drops another bomb on him before he can recover. "Because that computer belongs to Soldier, right?"

"What? No!"

Now she is the one who looks confused. "It doesn't? Then why did he delete those files?"

"The hell are you talking about?" Reaper's attention is half-distracted. His eyes change focus from the video call to the wisp's glow reflected from the communicator's screen. "He - it doesn't," he makes a noise of frustration. "Fuck if I know why it chooses to do anything. I don't know. I don't even know what gender it is or if it's even human, let alone why it decided to screw me over like that."

"Reaper," she says slowly. It's the most seriousness he has ever seen from her. "I don't think the deleted data contains what you think it does. The files are gone, but I managed to retrace the steps and obtain a rough estimate of how many bytes of data has been deleted. The combined size of those files simply isn't large enough to be research data on your condition."

"What could it be then?"

Sombra shrugs. "Who knows? Personal stuff, most likely. Hey, maybe cat photos. Think your friend likes cats? He's as ornery as one, so maybe he'll get along with them."

"No." Reaper shakes his head once. Then again.

And again.

"No. No. No. "

Belatedly, he realizes that a part of him is disintegrating, separating from his body and dispersing into an avalanche of black cloud that spills across the floor. From the back of the room, there's a chime of alarm, but he's too shaken to respond to it. Taking a deep breath, he steels his mind, stopping the disintegration in its progress.

To Sombra's credit, she doesn't comment on his brief breakdown, having learnt from previous incidents to respect his personal space when this happens. He's grudgingly grateful that she seems to have remembered.

After a moment, it feels like he can breathe safely again. "I'm not talking about this anymore," he mutters. "Recover the data if you can. That's all I need from you."

"Eh, sure thing. I'll get back to you if I find anything. What'll you do in the meantime?"

"Mission," Reaper responds automatically. He puts a clawed hand on his mask, feeling the impending arrival of a throbbing headache. "Haven't had the time to check out one of my leads yet. It's about time I get it over with."

With one last cheery wave of farewell, the purple digital skull disappears from the communicator screen, signalling the end of the video call.

For a moment, he stares at his reflection on the black screen - not thinking and not doing anything - basking in the peace and quiet of his surroundings. But that calm is short-lived, because even if he is not faced towards the wisp, he can still see its blinks from the communicator as well as the light bouncing off the surface of the wall he's facing. Without his consent, his brain translates the message.

G A B E.

That's it. Just four measly letters, and the destructive implication of it blows over Reaper like a hurricane.

"Fuck off," he growls back, obstinately refusing to turn around and face the wisp - lest he sees a ghost. Or a faint blue glow, in the exact shade as the strike-commander coat that he had grown to loathe but now misses with a desperation that terrifies him.

It's not wise to go on a mission with a partner who you don't trust. But the longer Reaper puts it off, the staler his intel becomes and the more unpredictable the outcome gets.

If it turns out that the wisp is nothing but an undercover agent for Talon, then Reaper is probably going to break down and break some things. And kill someone. Murder probably shouldn't be used as a therapeutic tool, but it's not like his career choice provides any other good mental healthcare benefits anyways.

If the wisp turns out to be... related to Jack, then - well, he's not going to think about it for now.

Leaving for the mission without the wisp is simply not doable. A part of being able to track the other with his nanites is that the other can also track him back. What has once been a comfortable fact is now making him even more paranoid after the trust has been broken. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Better to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Reaper sorts through the sheets of paper once again, recalling the origin of these files. He had retrieved them during that trip to the scientist's house in order to learn more about the wisp. The scientist hadn't known much about souls nor the bizarre interactions souls have with nanites, but she had been rather brilliant in a different way.

From what he has gathered from the files left behind on her coffee table, she had been keeping a meticulous record of all his actions through various local newspapers, connecting the dots that created a clear map of all of his past kills and travel records. That alone might not be impressive, but she had also correctly predicted that she herself would be his next victim. The reason she jotted down along the margins of the documents hadn't been the real reason that Reaper had sought her out, but it is clear that she understood his goal simply from following vague patterns in the media.

What's interesting is that there are several more names after hers on the list that he doesn't recognize. The reason she provided for them becoming his targets in the future is worth looking into. If the notes are right, then these people are big names that have had a personal hand in what happened to Overwatch. Cross-references with his other resources have also suggested the same thing, so he's willing to stake on the intel being trustworthy.

As he gathers his supplies, he notices Soldier hovering over the pile of paper, mulling over the contents of the page. Normally, he would ask the other what it thinks about the mission to get a second opinion beforehand. But after what happened, he would rather follow his own intuition and improvise on the fly if the situation develops for the worse.

The air around them is still awkward, and Reaper doesn't know what to make of it. So he decides to put it to the back of his mind for now.

The wisp makes a quiet chime.

"Now you feel like talking?" he says, though his tone isn't as hostile as he would have liked. "Too bad."

It chimes again, this time a little more urgent.

"Calm down. I've cross-referenced the intel with the other data we've collected. Seems to be legitimate," he says, not really knowing why he's explaining himself to the wisp. "Unless you're upset that the intel we retrieved from that woman's house is on paper? Can't manipulate or delete it, the way you did with the data in Gibraltar."

To this, Soldier has no response. It makes a quiet noise that sounds like a sigh, and hovers back to the other side of the room.

Reaper tells himself that he'll figure out what to do with the wisp later, once Sombra works her magic and retrieves the deleted data. For now, the mission comes first.

One of the targets frequently attends an evening gallery at Rialto, and the woman's notes suggest that based on previous behavioural patterns, the next occurrence will be in a few days. Now is the time to strike.

Shit goes to hell neatly in a hand basket, to put it mildly.

Reaper berates himself for not having learnt from the last time he ran a mission in Rialto at night and decided to improvise along the way. Except this time, his team consists of only two members - and the wisp is virtually no help in combat despite all of its bravado, so he's alone in dealing with the waves of enemy.

Fuck Rialto. This place is cursed, he swears.

The details on those papers are a trap - this, he has realized a little too late when he sneaked into the gallery only to receive a face full of guns. That woman had been brilliant indeed, just in a different way than he has expected.

Reaper's super soldier reflexes has come in handy, and he managed to escape from the first group with just a few bullet holes through his jacket. But another group soon arrived, and he had to duck into one of the rooms to avoid a head-on collision.

So here he is now, trying desperately to blend in with the floral wallpapers as he makes his escape from the property. Unfortunately, surrounded by colourful and cheery petals, his black coat sticks out like a sore thumb.

Moving to the end of the hallway, he comes across two sentries guarding the only pair of doors that leads to what appears to be an indoor garden. He can feel the tremors of footsteps and murmurs of voices drawing closer from behind. There's not much time left until they are found.

Soldier pokes him.

"What," Reaper whispers.

He watches as the wisp moves to lightly touch one of the vases that they are currently kneeling behind. It would make an inconspicuous hiding spot, especially since the inside is not large enough for a regular human to cram into. Temporary solution or not, it would at least throw the incoming enemies off their trail.

"Can't you pick a prettier vase?"

Soldier gives him a look.

There's no time to waste. Right. Reaper grudgingly lets himself disperse into smoke and flow bit by bit into the vase so as to avoid detection. The interior is cozy and dark - and a bit smelly. It then occurs to him that the wisp can't hide in here; the material is thin enough that light will be able to shine through, resulting in a glaringly glowing vase and the two of them dead. He prepares to get out of there and find another place to hide, brain running miles per hour to think of a better plan.

Only, the wisp never comes in.

When he notices this, the footsteps have already arrived. He can't see what is happening from the interior of the vase, but a few of the men make noises of surprise, followed by grunts of commands and hurried footsteps as they depart in another direction. Light , he catches one of them say. Over there.

Nanites tug at his senses as he tries to get a good read on where Soldier is heading. The signal grows weaker as the distance widens, suggesting that once again the wisp has played bait to lure the enemies away from him.

But there's no time to waste. Reaper waits for the men's footsteps to fade away before materializing in front of the two sentries. Their eyes widen simultaneously in fear, and before their hands can reach for their communicators, he dispatch them with two point-blank blows from his shotguns. The noise that the guns make is already reverberating through the hallway and creating a loud racket, but he is counting on that.

Bursting through the entrance that lead to the indoor garden, Reaper comes to a stop in from of a big fountain. The splashing water drowns out all other noises, making it hard to gauge what's happening on the outside.

He closes his eyes, mentally picturing the ring shape of the building. After hearing the noise, the enemies would no doubt come to investigate, giving Soldier ample opportunity to sneak away from them. The garden can be accessed anywhere along the circular hallway, which the wisp has gone down in the opposite direction. Therefore, cutting a path through the garden would be the quickest way to meet up with each other again.

Unfortunately, it appears the enemy has predicted that to happen.

The sound of clapping jolts Reaper from his thoughts. A masked man walks out from behind all the exotic plants, his pace leisurely and confident.

"Well done overcoming all your adversaries so far. I'm impressed," the man says. "I have been informed that you might come after me. But it's taken you so long that I almost got bored of waiting."

"You're the one then," Reaper says. "The dutiful UN council member - or shall I say, Talon's faithful lapdog?"

"And you are Talon's pitiful lab rat. What's your point?" The masked man walks closer, tilting his head in amusement as he sees the twin shotguns raised to aim at his head. "They might have overlooked their pet's misbehaviour in the past, but don't count on their leniency this time. You're not walking out of this so easily."

Reaper snorts. "Keep deluding yourself. You think Talon gives a fuck? You have long outlived your usefulness."

Not giving the other any time to think, he grips the shotgun trigger, and pulls.

But the impact doesn't happen.

The masked man laughs. "What's that? An equipment malfunction? Don't be too hard on yourself. It happens sometimes."

No. That would be impossible. Reaper's Hellfire shotguns and pellets are all made out of his nanites. It'd be virtually impossible for there to be a malfunction, unless a EM field is interfering with the neuroelectric signals that he uses to give the nanites their next set of instructions.

"What did you do?" He looks around at the surrounding plants, suddenly realizing that some of the odd-looking vines may not in fact be vines but instead wires. The water fountain which he thought to be a mild nuisance is probably intentionally tweaked to be as loud as possible to divert his attention. And it has succeeded.

Reaper didn't hear the faint whirring of the EM field generator, and now he is very well trapped like a fly in the spider's web.

The masked man grabs the barrel of one of his shotguns, tilting it sideways as if to inspect it. "Quite a vicious thing, these nanites are. Is this how you've offed my ex-employee?"

Reaper swings his arm, but barely misses the man's cheek. A few of the surrounding bushes flash red, to which he notices the laser weapons hidden inside only a second before they tear through his body.

Screaming in pain, Reaper tumbles to the ground. With his blurry vision, he sees a pair of dress shoes step closer.

"Ah ah ah. Be careful now. These lasers are the city's most expensive, high-grade, light-sensitive automatic defense systems. Any wrong move towards me, and they will cut through human flesh like a hot knife through butter."

Slowly, Reaper struggles to his feet. Fuck. It feels like his innards are falling out, but like hell he's going to be crawling on the floor in front of this condescending son of a bitch.

"You talk too much," he leers. It's true. But it's also important to keep the man talking in order to buy himself more time. "Are these trash really high end tech? They look like toys you can buy from a dollar store."

The taunt works, because what's visible of the man's face turns beet red. Unfortunately it works a little too well, because as the man proceeds to rant off the long list of specs that each individual weapon has, he presses a button on a remote controller to send a painful electric shock through Reaper's body every time he finishes a sentence.

It's not ideal, but Reaper will take it. Sadism, he can work with. No matter what physical pain he has to endure, he can always return the favor later. If the masked man had been a better human being, then Reaper would be dead. And unlike what his moniker seems to suggest, death is one thing that he cannot return from. Not again.

After one final zap, Reaper finds himself crumpled to the floor. Half delirious from the shock and blood loss, it takes a few seconds for him to mentally catch up as he sees a blurry light coming from the other end of the garden.

Unfortunately the man also turns around and notices the light. Though he seems to be more delighted than anything else.

"Ah, tell your toy to come closer. I've been waiting," he says, opening beckoning for the wisp to come forward. "To tell you the truth, I've been quite fascinated with the local legends that have spawned out of your activities. Even my own nephew has heard about the exploits of the grim reaper and his light companion - mind you, only as a ghost story kids tell to scare each other. Things like seeing a bright light before you die," he laughs. "Although I don't plan on dying of course."

With no further prompting needed, Soldier floats closer. It cautiously circles around the masked man, and then darts to the injured mercenary's side.

"Hey, lil guy," Reaper says, and receives a feather-light poke in response. Then, as if having obtained satisfactory confirmation that he is not dead, Soldier leaves his side and slowly floats upwards.

Once it flies to a position that's a few inches from the masked man's face, it stops and hovers there.

"What are you trying to do? Please, do humour me." The man ignores the wisp and addresses Reaper on the ground. It's clear he doesn't perceive it to be any sort of threat at all. "Your nanite toy can't do anything to me. The electromagnetic field is still in effect, remember? So call the thing off and I might consider making your death just the slightest bit less painful."

Soldier chimes, bringing all eyes back on him.

The man reaches out for it. "What a curious little contraption. If I didn't know any better, I'd have said that it's not just random arrangement of nanites under your control, but that it has its own will."

The wisp flickers once, and that's all the warning anyone gets before it emits a blinding light right in front of the masked man's eyes.

The man screams as he stumbles backwards in an attempt to shield his eyes, remote controller falling onto the ground in his frenzy.

Light-sensitive automatic defense system , Reaper recalls with amusement as he hears the confused whirring of the surrounding laser machines as they try to adapt to the light. Load of good all the guy's money did.

Not wasting the opportunity, he keeps his eyes firmly closed as he retrieves his shotguns from memory and bashes the masked man's skull in with one ruthless swing while the other is still writhing in agony. It's a shame that he doesn't get to see the fucker die, but the screaming satisfies him enough.

He squints. Soldier is flickering erratically now, no doubt starting to run out of fuel; nanites are still disabled, so it must have used its own soul's energy to power the light show. Quickly fetching the drooping wisp, he makes a dash for the exit.

One of the lasers reorients itself just in time to pierce one last beam through his stomach, causing him to grunt in pain. But he is finally out of the area of effect for the EM field, so his nanites can finally start regenerating his body.

Using the last ounce of his strength, Reaper carries them back to their safe house and collapses onto the floor.

Over the next few hours, Reaper falls in and out of consciousness periodically. More than once, he wakes up - not remembering how he managed to get onto the bed - to Soldier's thinly-veiled fretting. It has somehow regained enough energy to lay a clumsily folded sheet of wet paper towel over his forehead, which makes him breathe a sigh of relief at its quick recovery.

He lifts his arm, and it feels heavy like stone. But somehow, he musters up enough energy to reach for the wisp -

- And flick it away.

"'M' fine. See?" he mutters. "Worry wart."

The world fades again.

The next time Reaper wakes up, there's smoke surrounding him.

No, he corrects himself. He is the smoke. And that's odd - the nanites shouldn't be smoking this much while he's recuperating. Maybe they're running out of energy? But he's tired and sleepy and the dream world beckons, so he closes his eyes again, ignoring the chimes of alarm that his companion is making.

Then there's black.

Brief flash of light on his face.

More darkness.

The light returns.

Something soft brushes over his nose, and then pulls on his left cheek. Then the other cheek. Then repeats.

Pulse of panic.

Ticking of a clock.

More incessant pokes.

A flickering light.

And then the oddest sensation.

If someone were to ask Reaper what consuming a soul is like, he would describe it as feeling a warmth coil down your body and settle into the pit of your stomach - a sensation that is light but inexplicably heavy at the same time. There is no taste - not in the traditional way at least - but it sates a craving that he didn't know that he had.

In spite of the moral dilemma, he has never felt particularly sick after consuming someone's soul. They help regenerate his body, and he has long accepted the necessity of utilizing commonly perceived evils for the greater good.

But this time, it feels different. The warmth is still there. The nanite swarm still screams in elation at the proximity to a potential prey that will help replenishing their energy. The taste is familiar and almost nostalgic, but he is hit with a sense of wrongness so repugnant that it makes him searingly nauseous on the inside.

Don't let him do this , some buried part of him screams. Not again. Please.

Reaper jolts awake immediately, eyes squinting slightly from the blur of light that his face is basked in. It takes a moment to recognize Soldier, who has settled down into the crook of his neck, seemingly dozing.

Then he takes in its faded colour and wonky shape, like a ball of yarn that is gradually being unraveled and pulled apart. He follows a piece of the thickest string leaving the wisp all the way as the strand twirls around and.. around and...

Into his mouth.

"You fucking idiot!" Reaper spats out. He quickly commands his nanites to release the soul strand, which falls down and gradually settles back into the wisp's main body. " Do you have a death wish?! "

He wants to desperately shake it, but he's worried that the wisp's entire body will break apart at the slightest touch. So instead, he holds it close in a tight hug as he waits for all the soul strings to retract.

After a little rest, Soldier flutters weakly and makes a tiny chime that shouldn't be so defiant for how tired it sounds.

Reaper sighs. This isn't an argument that he's going to win in one night.

"Look. We'll talk later because I'm tired as fuck. But if I wake up and find that you've gotten yourself eaten, I swear I will reassemble you molecule by molecule and kill you all over again for the shit load of trouble you've given me so far."

He side-eyes the wisp, trying to gauge its reaction.

"Promise?"

After he pokes it again, it makes a noise of reluctant agreement.

"Good," Reaper says, feeling faint again as he lays back down. The adrenaline rush has left him, leaving only the hollow husk of an extremely sore body for him to deal with; he's no doubt destroyed some of the healing work his nanites have done with his sudden movements. "I'll be fine. So be patient and let my nanites work their magic."

Soldier sequesters itself back into the crook of his neck, and he's too damn tired to hold back a grunt of contentment at the offer of warmth and comfort.

"You've got bats for brain, anyone ever tell you that?" he mumbles as he falls asleep. "Almost reminds me of...."

Jack.

Jack was saying something to him, but Gabriel couldn't hear it over the pounding pain pulsing through his entire body and the sound of explosions as they blazed across the Zurich base.

He had been a little too late, prepared for one bomb when there were several - prepared for only a few moles when the entire organization had been hollowed out to the core.

Jack was still saying something. Or screaming, perhaps. That would match his expression a little more. He looked devastated, like his entire world was falling apart around him when it was really only the building walls.

Take a deep breath Jackie , Gabriel wanted to tell him, only he couldn't. He frowned. Where did all this rubble come from, and why were they on top of him? He opened his mouth to ask, only to let loose a painful cough as he spat out a mouthful of blood onto the ground. Not a good sign, he thought as he stared at the growing pool of red on the ground.

The hand that was clutching his own - there was a hand? - tightened in response. He tilted his head so that he could look at Jack again.

Jack with his blue, blue eyes and his stupid face. What had all that determined expression ever gotten him?

Bruises and stitches, mostly. And one time more broken limbs than anyone could count. But the idiot had never learned when to give up.

Even now, he was no match for the darkness that swarmed around Gabriel, bellowing upwards like smoke pouring out of a volcano. But Jack didn't let go, though he almost lost his grip out of shock as the shadows curled towards him. But it wasn't enough to chase him away, and he tried even harder to move the rubble off of Gabriel.

When that didn't work, he shouted something, and tried to throw a rock at one of the smoky limbs. But the darkness separated in the middle, and the rock fell right through.

Idiot Jackie, trying to find a nightmare monster with sticks and stones. He was going to get himself killed this way.

Mustering the last of his strength, Gabriel managed to utter one word with his hoarse throat, "Run."

But Jack stood his ground and tried to punch through the shadows that had wrapped around Gabriel like a blanket. The smoke was unrelenting. It gripped Jack by the arm, and dragged him inside the dense cloud. The last thing he saw was Jack's back before the man disappeared into the smoke.

Where... where did Jack go?

He blinked. Tried to crane his neck.

Did Jack run away? Did the darkness swallow him whole?

A dream, Gabriel decided as his vision blurred. This had to be a dream, because such nightmarish limbs could exist nowhere else but in one. And darkness could not hiss and snarl and warp reality beyond recognition like that.

It did feel nice though, to know that he was so important to Jack - though that may have gotten the other killed. No. He shook his head Jack couldn't be dead. He must have ran off after having finally found a hint of self-preservation, and left Gabriel here. Yes, that must have been what happened.

Stupid Jack and his stupid lack of self-preservation. It was a broken record at this point, from the dawn of SEP to the downfall of Overwatch. Good riddance that the suicidal streak finally ended here. Thank fucking god that Jack had left him behind. The man was more stubborn than a mule. That tenacity though, it almost reminds him of...

"Soldier."

The wisp blinks once in response, and then instantly darts over to his side after noticing that he's awake - for the first time in three days, if the date displayed by the news station on the tiny TV screen is correct.

It - no, he - looks elated to see how much Reaper has recovered. He's practically bouncing like a puppy wagging its tail, light glowing bright and warm.

"Jack."

This causes the wisp to freeze in his tiny little wiggle of joy, and the terrible pretense makes Reaper snort. It's a wonder how he hasn't made the connection in so long, but he attributes it mostly to head trauma and the general traumatic nature of the memory.

It has taken him so long to remember what really happened during the collapse of the Zurich headquarter that the emotional impact of everything hits at once like a tidal wave. What Jack did for him. What he did to Jack. What Jack continues to do for him, even after they've both left their previous selves behind.

Reaper can't really find it in himself to be too angry at Jack for not revealing his identity, especially given how wrathful Reaper had been at the beginning - followed by his subsequent decision of joining their sworn enemy's ranks and hunting down Overwatch agents. Some of the wisp's previous actions and behaviour - which had seemed bizarre and random - now makes much more sense.

A few months ago, he would have considered the deception itself to be an irreparable betrayal. Now, he is tired of feeling betrayed all the time. It's not so much as what others have done to him, so much as a mentality that he carries to keep himself moving forward. Before, he needed the hatred - the desire to get even with the world for some perceived wrong - but not anymore.

Now, Reaper is just tired. Tired, but happy. So he's willing to let go of his hurt this time, and just listen for once.

"Jack," he repeats.

He looks directly at the wisp, so there's no confusion as to who he is addressing.

"Yeah, I'm talking to you." Reaper smirks. "The jig's up. I remember now."

He jabs the wisp, who is still frozen in place.

"I remember the idiot who I thought for the longest time had left me behind to die in the Zurich explosion," he says. "But guess what? In actuality, the idiot tried to save me from my own nanites while not knowing what they were. The nanites ended up swallowing his body for energy, giving me a second chance at life. I remember the same idiot - who still keeps following me everywhere even though he lost his body because of me, and now he's basically nothing but a grumpy soul globe. Sounds like anyone you recognize?"

Jack makes a tiny noise, and jabs him back.

G A B E.

"Yeah, that's me," Reaper utters softly. "Don't wear it out."

"I couldn't recover what you were looking for," Sombra says. "Seems like the files on that computer are completely destroyed."

"Don't worry about it."

She freezes, then turns around to directly face Reaper on the communicator screen. "Excuse me? Did you just say don't worry about it? Who are you and what have you done with Mister Grumpypan - uh, I mean Reaper?"

Mentally groaning at her dramatics, Reaper slowly lowers his face to his palm. "Sombra."

"What, you gotta admit that it's weird!" She spins around in her office chair, snickering at his reaction. "Only a week ago, you were making me extract those data ASAP under the threat of cursing me to an eternity of wearing black-coloured fabrics only -"

"I did not."

"- And now you're changing your tune completely. Let me take a good look." Sombra leans closer. "Is that a smile beneath the edgy mask I see?"

"I don't smile," Reaper responds automatically. "Anyway, the situation has resolved itself. I don't need the data anymore. Just calling to let you know that."

Having scrutinized him to her satisfaction, Sombra leans back in her seat and smiles breezily. "You're welcome. I accept payment in gossips and blackmailing materials, by the way."

The wisp darts by to perch on his shoulder, causing her to blink in surprise.

"Hey, is that your lil friend over there? Good to see that you two are getting along again. Life just isn't the same without our two resident troublemakers trying to kill each other on a daily basis. Well, there's kill, and then kill - y'know what I'm talking about?" She looks to the side at something flashing on one of her numerous computer monitors. "Oh wait, oops. Business calls. Talk to you later!"

Reaper snorts. "Bye, Sombra." He looks down at Jack, who appears to be practically melting in his new seat. "Someone's looking comfy," he teases. "Planning on moving any time soon?"

The wisp shakes slightly from side to side, and makes a chime of contentment. This causes Reaper to laugh, as he resigns himself to the fate of being a pillow for the time being.

After around ten minutes of lounging around doing nothing in particular, he remembers Sombra's video call again.

"Hey."

Jack blinks once, to show that he's listening.

"You still haven't told me what you were doing at Gibraltar. Granted, it's your computer that you were accessing, so I understand if it's something private and you would rather not talk about."

After a long pause, the wisp slowly pulls himself up to hover in the air. At first, he starts to signal the beginning of a sentence in morse code, and then stops in frustration. Looking around, he glides over to the communicator lying on the table. Brandishing the nanites around him, he turns on the device's power and accesses the texting chat window. The process is slow and awkward, but letter by letter, he starts typing.

Reaper leans over to read the letters on the screen. One word stands out.

Important.

"Important? What's important?"

A pause, and then more typing.

Me.

"You're important?" Hearing the wisp chimes in frustration, Reaper guesses again. "It's important to you."

Jack nods, but he doesn't elaborate any further. He looks frustrated with the communicator's interface, so Reaper decides to not press any further. They have all the time in the world after this.

Reaper tosses the communicator to the side, and kicks his feet up onto the table as he leans back. He's secretly pleased that the wisp returns to his side, burrowing deeper inside his shirt. They are absolutely not cuddling - you can't cuddle with a ball of light, after all. But the warmth is comfortable all the same. They probably wouldn't have been this close if Jack was still inside his original body; before, Gabriel had his hardass commander image to maintain, while Jack was just bad at emotions in general.

"I wish you weren't an idiot and got yourself eaten," he says absentmindedly.

A big part of him feels really guilty about being the cause of Jack's loss of body. Though he didn't have the same kind of control over his nanites back then, so it wasn't like he could have made a difference. He's eternally glad that the nanites have somehow decided to spare Jack's soul, because he's not sure what he would have done with himself if he finds out that he has accidentally swallowed it.

"But hey, I guess you can say that I really ate you out ."

Reaper receives a sharp zap in response to his terrible joke, but he laughs anyways. It's easy to avoid thinking of all the worst case scenarios, with the wisp so energetic and whole beside him. But still, he can't help but wonder about what it's like without a body, how uncanny it must feel.

"Think Moira will make you a new body if I threaten her really, really nicely?"

The moment Jack hears her name, he makes a sharp screechy noise that sounds like cracked bells. It's so dissonant that Reaper has to cover his ears. Well, guess that's a no. Or more like, no way in hell . While Jack has slowly warmed up to Sombra, it seems that he will never be particularly fond of Moira.

"Right, but it's not like you can stay this way forever." Reaper gives him a look. "A little wind can blow you over in this state. If not Moira, we need to find some other specialist to deal with this situation."

They fall into silence, mulling over the situation.

Tentatively, Jack pokes him to get his attention. Then the wisp blinks out a series of letters.

G U N S.

"Guns? My guns?" Reaper echoes, instinctively manifesting the shotguns with his nanites. He grips one of them and examines it closely. "What about them?"

But even before Jack responds, his brain is already working overtime to connect the dots.

"The nanites broke down my original shotguns in order to create a blueprint of them, so that I can construct a new pair whenever I need to," he says slowly, thinking as he goes. "So what you're saying is that if the nanites were the one to have broken your body down in the first place, they might also have kept a blue print of your body like they did with my shotguns."

Jack looks confused, which means that's not what he was thinking of before. But he bobs up and down enthusiastically, which Reaper takes as a sign of approval.

Looking around the room, Reaper swipes one of the oranges lying on the kitchen counter with an shadow-clad arm, allowing the nanites to consume the fruit whole. He mentally pictures the orange the same way he would with his shotguns, and forcefully pulls it from his imagination into reality.

In his hand is the same brightly coloured fruit, restored like new. He peels it tentatively, and sees that the interior is as an orange should be. He eats one of the slices. The taste seems right too.

"This might really work."

Reaper immediately rises up, moving around the room to gather up his equipment. The wisp follows him, trembling slightly from tentative but growing hope.

"I'll need more energy before I can re-render an entire body." There's still plenty of ex-Overwatch traitors and low-ranking Talon goons left on their kill list, more than enough to spare. "Let's go hunting."

The actual materialization of the body itself is pretty anti-climatic. Reaper just closes his eyes and pictures Jack, and then bam . There Jack's body is, lying on the ground like it's nobody's business. It goes so smoothly that he's mildly disappointed, having mentally prepared himself for accidentally disfiguring the body beyond recognition on the first try.

The two huddle in front of the body, staring down at it - waiting for something to happen.

"Now what?"

The wisp chimes, sounding equally confused.

Hesitantly, he approaches his body. At first brush of soul to skin, nothing happens. But as if a vacuum has opened up, the wisp begins to unfurl into thin strands, gradually and gradually being pulled into the chest cavity until the ball of light disappears entirely.

"Hey," is Jack's first word, once he is properly slotted back into his body.

He looks awkward and shy, stretching his legs and touching his arms dubiously as if he is expecting them to vanish into the thin air at any given moment. Those blue eyes are the same as always, and the hair - that ridiculous cowlick is still there, but when has his hair gone completely white? Though he's undoubtedly here, safe and real and beautiful with all his ugly imperfections in a way that makes Reaper want to cry.

Instead of crying, Reaper says, "The hell's on your face?"

"What?" Jack touches his face, fingers tracing the scars that definitely weren't there before. He frowns in contemplation. "Oh. Think I got them right before I lost my body. Some of the rocks slashed my face when they were blasted away by the explosion. Guess the nanites didn't know what I originally looked like, so they can't restore me completely."

"Right," Reaper says, shuffling on the balls of his feet.

Mentally, he's trying to find the best way to tackle-hug someone without tackling or hugging them, and his mind is coming up empty.

Jack is no doubt still trying to get accustomed to the new body, so he probably shouldn't do anything too startling out of character. Though what he really wants to do right now is something really drastic like toss Jack in the air up and down. Or squeeze Jack and never let go. Or punch Jack. Or kiss him. And then kill him.

Coughing violently, Reaper shakes himself out his scattered daydream. He feels those eyes on him again, the gaze even but with a faint trace of concern.

"You alright?" Jack asks.

"I'm fine."

They fall into an uncharacteristically uncomfortable silence, their interrupted dynamics leaving them unbalanced.

As a wisp, Jack had no where else to go but with Reaper, due to the limitations of not having a body. But now that Jack has recovered his body, he can go anywhere he wants to. He's no longer confined to following Reaper around, which means that he will probably leave soon and find something better to do. Reaper will have to learn to fight by himself again. It will be irritating, but he can cope with-

"Hey." A hand on his shoulder breaks him out of his thoughts. Jack is scowling this time - and god, he can't believe that he even misses that ugly mug scowling at him. "You're thinking too much."

Reaper holds still as the other unclasps his bone mask and removes it, feeling oddly self-conscious at having the other see his grotesque face for the first time not as a wisp, but as a human being. Though instead of fear or disgust, Jack only smiles faintly, as if having seen an old friend instead of a monster masquerading as a man.

"I owe you some explanation," Jack says, fiddling with the mask in his hands. "Where do you want me to start?"

It's a loaded question, and one that Reaper doesn't want to delve too deeply into so soon. So he starts with something simpler and more recent on his mind. "Gibraltar. Was that the only time you deleted something from the bases we've raided?"

"Yeah." Remembering the event, Jack's eyebrows furl. "Like I said, the files that I deleted, they were," he trails off, struggling to find the right words. "They were important to me."

"In hiding your identity?"

Jack huffs. "No, that's got fuck-all to do with it. Apart from not telling you who I was, I didn't really do anything else to deceive you. The reason your missions weren't turning up any information on my whereabouts is because I wasn't anywhere out there. I was right beside you."

"Then why?" Reaper prompts. He wants to understand, he really does. He needs a good justification for having experienced the hurt that he has felt, something to make the suffering all worth it. "What was in these files?"

"Nothing." Seeing the other's look, Jack quickly amends. "Nothing important to anyone but me, at least. They were mostly photos, some videos, letters from family, chat logs... The things I used to look at when I felt trapped in my position as the strike-commander. Things to get me outside of my head, to remind me of the reason I voluntarily agreed to take on that responsibility." He snorts, voice turning bitter. "Helps me remember what made this world worth fighting for, for all the good that it did."

It all perfectly makes sense, and Reaper reels in the revelation of how off he had been with his assumptions.

"I was afraid that somebody might go there and ransack the place. Talon's bound to initiate a raid on the watchpoint eventually. Even though I like to think that I'm not the same man anymore, the idea of somebody going through those files pisses me off. Figured it'd be better to delete them altogether, rather than have it come bite me in the ass later."

"So you really weren't trying to sabotage me," Reaper says, needing to hear the confirmation.

"No."

"These files," he recalls the images that flashed across the holographic screen. It then becomes clear to him why he has seen what he has in the thumbnails of those files, and his heart soars in his chest. "They were important to you?"

"Yeah," Jack says slowly, suspicious of his line of inquiry. "I said that."

"So then, my photos were important to you?"

The confusion transforms into realization and then blossoms into a deep blush on Jack's face within the span of a few seconds.

"Fuck you," Jack says, and then reacts in one of the two settings of the patented Morrison's Tried-and-True Method of Coping With Emotions - by quickly walking away.

Reaper supposes that he should feel grateful that he doesn't get punched instead, but he finds himself surprised by the warm tingle that gets caught up into his chest and refuses to leave. He feels strange. Agitated, almost. Too big for his skin. Like being reborn anew. Like being able to breathe for the first time in a very long while.

Before Jack crosses the doorway, he looks back and meets Reaper's eyes.

Maintaining eye contact, he leans down and places a light kiss on the skull mask that he's somehow still holding in his hand, and then tosses the mask back to its owner. The tips of his red ears is all that can be seen before they too disappear into the hallway.

This time, the noise that leaves Reaper's lungs is not the manic cackling of a mercenary who revels in the pain of his opponents, but the laughter of Gabriel Reyes, who finds himself inexplicably beholden to Jack Morrison's antics once again.

For the next week or so, they move from motel to motel, avoiding extended conflicts as Jack is still getting used to fighting in his old body again. Reaper will never forget the wondrous expression on the man's face when he bites down on the first pizza that he's had in a long time.

It takes a while, but Jack gets to the rest of his story - what he has done, why he has chosen to stay with the monster who killed him, as well as why he has decided not to reveal who he is in all this time.

"I wasn't really thinking," he admits, looking embarrassed. "Thought the shadow tentacles were eating you, so I tried to help. Got eaten instead. Took a long time to get over the shock and confusion of that."

"Hell, I bet. Sounds like something out of a crazy acid trip."

"I was going to tell you. But then I found out about this entire other side of you that you kept hidden from me, murderous black clouds and all. And soon after that, you joined Talon, and I didn't know what to think."

Huh, that does sound pretty incriminating. Reaper would probably have tried to strangle Jack if he had been in that position. "I'm surprised that you decided to stick around after all that, let alone help me out."

"Don't get me wrong. I was really pissed at you in the beginning. But at the rate you were going, you were gonna get yourself killed before I can kill you myself." Jack shoots him a wry grin. "Someone's gotta watch your back."

"How sweet," Reaper quips. "Planning on killing me still?"

There's a mischievous gleam in those blue eyes again, the kind that makes his pulse quicken. "What do you think?" Then Jack's grin falls a little, and he looks away. "Should've told you earlier. Sorry."

"Why didn't you?"

"Didn't think it would go over well. Still, I should have said it. That was my fault."

Reaper would be lying if he says that it doesn't bother him, but he's learning to look past that and focus on what the other is saying - or more specifically, isn't saying. And what he finds is - oh.

Recalling all the times in the past that he has cursed and badmouthed Jack in front of the wisp, he wants to smack his head against a wall. This is probably the equivalent of being inebriated and complaining about your ex, while not realizing that the person who's comforting you and listening to all your woes is your ex. Not that he's had that happen to him before, until now apparently.

"Ah fuck," he groans. "You're not gonna let me live that down, are you?"

Jack searches his face, and relaxes a little. "Nah. Figure we're about even by now, with how badly we both dealt with this shit."

It had been easy to become complacent when Jack and Gabriel got along so well, but the downside is that they didn't know what to do when things were falling apart. Now they're learning, together, how to slowly mend the pieces. The first step to that is communication, and there's still one topic that Reaper still needs to discuss.

"So what are you planning on doing now?"

"Now? Sleep, probably. It's getting late."

"No," Reaper growls in frustration. "I mean long term. Retirement's still an option, you know. You can travel around the globe, wear those stupid Hawaiian shirts that you love so much, experience the world with your new body, grow a beard, hug a crocodile, raise some kids, play some golf. Or go back to Indiana. Your house is still there - I checked."

Jack gives him a long look, and then shakes his head. "For someone so smart, you can be pretty fucking stupid sometimes, Gabe."

Between the two of them, Reaper is pretty sure that he is not the dumbass of this relationship. Ana can testify; she once called Gabriel dumb and Jack dumber, which he shamelessly counts as a victory in his book. But anyways, the moral of the story is that Reaper is always right, and Jack's just too stubborn to realize that.

He opens his mouth to say so, but Jack interrupts. "What I mean is that you're not getting rid of me so easily. We're going to take over Talon together. I'll follow you to hell and back if I have to."

It's a loaded promise, but a resolute one. Reaper leans back in his seat - lets his body relax. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

The motel clerk doesn't bat an eye when Reaper asks for a room with one bed, pauses, and then quickly amends it to two.

The downside of having two people now means that there's two people's expenses to take care of. They've quickly found out that while Jack is still able to return to his wispy form, he isn't able to re-manifest his body with complete ease. So unfortunately, they are stuck with the more expensive option for now.

They don't talk about how as a wisp, he likes to sleep with himself buried in Reaper's hood. They also don't talk about how Reaper much misses that arrangement, now that both of them have physical bodies again.

Lying wide awake under a layer of blanket, Reaper shuffles and turns, trying to find a position that feels comfortable. But something always seems to be off.

Reaper looks to the other side of the room, where the moonlight illustrates the silhouette of a man lying so still that he could only be awake. No surprise there. Jack thinks pretending to be asleep is the equivalent of pretending to be a statue.

"Hey."

Jack jolts, blinking in surprise to see the other leaning over him by his beside. "What."

"Move over."

Not waiting for him to react, Reaper shoves him over and crawls underneath the blanket, eliciting a disgruntled noise in response. The bed is a little to small for two super soldiers of their stature. Their bodies shuffle and twist, limbs flailing as they contest for space.

"Your elbow is poking into my ribs," Jack grumbles.

Reaper moves. "Better?"

"Now you're too close."

"Shut up and sleep."

For a moment, Reaper thinks the other has decided to follow his orders, but that hope quickly vanishes as the other starts talking again. "I think this sleeping arrangement worked better when I was tinier."

"You were also a lot cuter when you couldn't complain."

Jack grunts. His head tilts lower, slipping all the way until his nose presses into the crook of Reaper's neck. It's the very same spot that the wisp likes to sleep in, and with that, the tension from their body gradually drains away.

"Not cute." Jack mumbles. "'M badass. Saved your life so many times."

"Sometimes unnecessarily." Recalling the most recent incident causes Reaper to scowl. "Idiot. What were you thinking, trying to feed me your own soul? Damn near gave me a fucking heart attack. Did you have a death wish?"

"Not really. I like my soul where it is," Jack shrugs, resolutely averting his eyes. "But, maybe, just 25% of my soul?"

"You were planning on giving me 25% of your soul," Reaper says flatly, pulling himself up so that he can stare the other down. "Because living beings are perfectly capable of surviving with 25% of their soul missing."

Being the ever stubborn bastard that he is, Jack merely scoffs in response. "It's not like there was any precedence to that situation. Plus, you were being a complete drama queen making all those noises and spilling smoke. It was interrupting my rest. I had to put a stop to your antics somehow."

In life, Jack Morrison has constantly confounded Gabriel Reyes with his extremely cryptic approach to emotional honesty. In death where the two are mere shadows of their former selves, this habit seems to have warped into an even greater dissonance between Jack's actions and words.

But Reaper has gotten better at looking past the barbed words and thorny expressions, his experience with interpreting all the wisp's nonverbal cues coming in handy.

So instead of becoming frustrated like he used to, Reaper just spends the next few minutes or so affectionately calling Jack every synonym for the word idiot under the sun, just in case the other isn't aware of it before. The idiot protests greatly to this treatment, but since he is quite evidently an idiot, Reaper decides to ignore his opinion.

At some point, Jack interrupts the tirade with a quiet, "hey." And when Reaper looks at him, he says, "I'm glad you're okay."

There's a giddy feeling bubbling in Reaper's chest, a sensation that he hasn't felt for quite a long time. It makes his lips twitch, and he has to struggle hard in order to not grin like a crazy maniac.

"Idiot," Reaper repeats. But when he pulls the other even closer, Jack flashes him a tiny smile, so he thinks they're finally both on the same page.

Alejandra knows about heroes. Mama told her about them, the ones who saved their world time and time again, bringing them hope. But what's lesser known is the words on the streets, a story so strange and fantastical that it reminds her of a dark fairy tale that she once read.

The story goes like this: if you see a bright light flash before your eyes, run as fast as you can because Death will soon follow after.

That's how she knows for sure that she's having a near-death experience - apart from the guns aimed at her head, of course. In the middle of her being cornered by a few members of the Los Muertos gang, a tiny wisp of light whimsically wanders right in.

The men turn around to look at it, some of them brandishing their firearms towards it. "What is this thing?"

The wisp chimes.

And then, it's as if the grim reaper himself swoops down upon them.

The streetlights go dark. What follows is a battle scene that comes right out of a nightmare. The surrounding shadows seem to have a will of their own, as they climb out of the walls and dance around the Los Muertos gang. One by one the men fall, knocked out by monstrous claws as they try to escape to no avail.

Even a machine gun is no match, as the black cloud disperses and reappears behind the man. It's the first time Alejandra can get a clear look at her saviour. A white, owl-skull mask. Black hood and dual shotguns. Just like in the wanted posters. It's Reaper in the flesh - wanted criminal, ruthless mercenary, and terrorist.

A series of chimes distracts her, and she looks over to see that the tiny wisp of light is still by her side.

The thing - whatever it is - seems to be trying to pull her away. It makes a motion, jabbing to the right. More than a little terrified by what's going on, she decides to follow it, but the noise of something being dropped onto the floor nearby distracts her.

It's a grenade - red and beeping.

Crying in fear, Alejandra tries to scramble away from it, but it's too late. She squeezes her eyes shut, bracing herself for the impact. Only, it never comes. A sturdy man is holding her, shielding her from the explosion using his own body. The man grunts and slowly gets up, revealing a glowing red visor and mask that hides his face from view.

She crawls backwards as the mysterious man gets back up, scared but captivated at the same time. Looking around, she sees that the wisp has disappeared, replaced by the white-haired man whose jacket has the same blue glow.

"You... saved me." She tries to meet his gaze. "Why?"

For a moment, it looks as if the man is about to step forward, so she flinches, squeezing her eyes shut on instincts. The next time she opens her eyes, only the wisp is there in the man's spot, fluttering in a rhythmic and soothing cadence as it hovers in the air.

Suddenly, a wallet is dropped onto her lap. She jumps in surprise. It's the one that was stolen from her by Los Muertos!

"Leave," Reaper says, standing over her with his arms crossed. "It's not safe around here."

Then with another swirl of shadows, the mercenary rejoins the wisp's side. The pair of them strike a stark contrast under the moonlight's embrace. Without another word, they walk down the alley together, motion in sync as if they are one mind in two bodies.

Overcoming her initial fear, Alejandra scrambles to call out to them. "You two are from that legend, aren't you? Thank you!"

Reaper doesn't turn around, but at the last minute before they disappear from view, the wisp does a tiny dance that looks like a wave.

Later on, as Alejandra animatedly describes her exciting encounter with the local legends to her mama, two figures watch her from a remote rooftop as she finally arrives at her house safely.

"Sentimental as always." One of Reaper's claws swipes at the other's jacket, coming up with a claw full of soot. "You're not indestructible, you know."

"Says the one who got her wallet back. Sounds like you're the one getting softer with age."

Chuckling softly, Reaper pulls Jack closer. "Hmm, let me think."

He makes both of their masks disappear, and leans forward so that there's only a breath of space between them. In spite of how much attitude the other tries to give him, Jack never fails to turn red whenever he does this. The sight is as endearing as always.

"Nope. Yours still take the cake. What did I tell you about jumping on top of live grenades again? Our plan is only just unfolding. You're not going to survive long enough for us to take over Talon together, if you keep volunteering yourself at the first sign of danger."

It has taken a long time for them to arrive at this point, and only more troubles lie ahead. They still fight as viciously as ever - both together and against one another. One of them will probably get himself killed at some point. And yet, Reaper wouldn't trade this for the world.

"Bite me."

There's that stubborn jut on Jack's lips again, the one that he hates to love and loves to hate. So he kisses him, grinning in satisfaction as the other's expression morphs into one of surprise. Then he dips down and presses another kiss onto those lips, until that expression, too, disappears.