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The emergency sirens were still ringing in his head.
Jack wasn’t sure when the ringing was going to stop. He wasn’t sure if it was normal how little he could hear even a day after the explosion. When he was younger and encountered similar situations on the battlefield, he could always count on SEP to patch him up fairly quickly, making all those months of human experimentation worthwhile.
He wasn’t young or that durable anymore.
Shuddering, he sat on top of the closed toilet and tried to avoid hugging himself. His skin was still blazing hot to the touch and blisters had begun appearing all over the burned areas, which comprised most of the right side of his body. He couldn’t feel his right hand properly, or most of his face. His vision was still blurry.
Most of what happened at the explosion still confused him. Jack was pretty sure that was an effect of the shock. As soon as he was out of the danger zone and hiding, he fell on a bed without even taking off his clothes or looking at his wounds and slept for hours.
When he woke up, he wasn’t brave enough to look at the calendar, afraid of the passage of time. Was the explosion yesterday? A week ago?
Jack squeezed his burned arm to snap himself out of it. Gingerly, he brought a hand to his face, touching the numb areas gingerly, hissing in pain at the feeling of his own touch. He found dried blood when he looked at his fingers.
Right. That probably needed fixing.
He knew he couldn’t stay at this safehouse forever: the risk of being found eventually was just too high. With that in mind, he took the emergency medkit from under the sink and looked at the single vodka bottle standing on the floor right next to his feet.
“Okay,” Jack breathed, and his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else entirely, raspier and hoarser than ever before. His fingers trembled around the needle and he stood up, settling himself in front of the bathroom’s mirror. “I can fix this.”
The face looking back at him had two big, uneven gashes crossing his nose and lips, and the skin on his neck was angry red and sort of glossy.
“Damn,” a smooth, concerned voice said in Jack’s ear. “That looks bad.”
“We’ve been through worse,” Jack mumbled, touching the smaller wound with the tip of his fingers, then staring at the bigger one, eyes fixed on the white of bone peeking through flesh and skin, trying not to flinch at the jolt of pain it provoked. “My stitches are shit. And I’m bad at sewing. I’ve always been bad at sewing; you should be the one sewing me up.”
“Your face isn’t a piece of cloth or a button,” the voice chided him. “And you know I can’t help you with this.”
“I know.”
“You’re on your own now.”
“I know,” Jack gritted his teeth as the needle pierced his flesh for the first time, right near his right eye. His eyes teared up every time he needed to force his vision in order to see properly and the tears stung and worsened the pain in his wounds. The ones he could still feel. He swayed once, twice. The pain made his head throb.
“You have broken ribs. Take care of your broken ribs,” the voice said.
“Later,” Jack snapped. He blinked, the needle hanging from his flesh halfway through the side of his nose. No one else was standing there. Jack was alone.
Shock, he told himself. I’m still in shock.
When he was done stitching his face, the sun was coming in through the window, signaling the sunrise, and his face was covered in blood, snot, and tears. There wasn’t any vodka left anymore and his legs and back hurt from standing still for too long, skin still burning.
Jack stared one last time at his badly burned and wounded body before deciding that the effort he had to take to patch it up properly would be too much. Mechanically, he stepped into the shower and let the cold shower fall over him, hoping to wash the blood and soot away. The cold water felt like a massive slap against his burns and Jack let a howl of pain, needing to grab the shower curtain to stay on his feet and not faint from the sensation. Jack, still dizzy with pain and fatigue, watched the blood disappear down the drain and stared at his feet, at the white porcelain of the tub and entertained the fantasy of filling it up to the brim and going under the water until he couldn’t breathe.
Then, a sudden thought came to him: not all of the blood covering his body was his. At the notion of having washed Gabriel’s blood off his body, Jack lowered himself down into the tub and hugged his knees, pressing them against his chest as he started to breathe too fast and his chest started to close, shaking with pain, loss, and weakness. He felt as if his own ribcage would crush what was left of his heart, his trembling hands torn between grasping at the skin of his knees and grabbing fistfuls of hair.
He stayed there until his body got stiff and his lips turned blue from the cold, falling on his way out of the shower when he tried to get up, legs too asleep to work properly. Falling on his right side, the wave of pain that followed prompted Jack to puke right there next to the discarded rolls of bandages and the empty vodka bottle.
Someone asked him if he was okay. But Jack was alone and grieving, and he knew his mind was just playing cruel tricks on him. Still.
“Gabriel,” he moaned, pressing his face against the cold surface of the floor. “Gabriel.”
There, naked on the floor and shivering like a wounded animal, Jack Morrison hated himself more than ever. He was only able to put himself together when the sun was already gone, and it was only in order to drag himself to bed. He should be hunting down the people who took Gabriel away from him. He should be sitting shiva for him and Overwatch.
Tomorrow. He would come up with a plan tomorrow.
(Many years would pass before Jack would aim his rifle again and find himself living with a purpose.)
With fire burning behind his eyelids and clinging to the chain of his dog tags like a lifeline, Jack drifted into sleep. The world had ended and he was the last man standing.
There was nothing else to do but go on.