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Ana had already had her eye replaced by the Egyptian military, when she signed up for the Strike Team. So the U.N. putting her on an injection regiment didn’t seem like too big a deal. One of those things that was objectively concerning, but since the world was ending, ultimately didn’t matter much. Even if the liquid in the chamber made a faint crackling sound, and felt electric when it went in her veins.
The doctors that administered the serum didn’t tell her what it was for, but Gabe and Jack did. Whenever Ana’s unit had gotten news about American war efforts, they had all made jokes about the country’s apparent steroid abuse strategy. She felt a little bad meeting SEP participants in the flesh. Especially since they were so helpful.
“It’s an activated enhancement,” Gabriel told her. She was sitting with him and Jack in a canvas tent set up in the middle of an impromptu military base. There were footsteps and voices all around them so they were leaned in close, like kids gossiping at a slumber party. “A way of boosting your adrenaline, minimizing the pain you feel. If it ran all the time, you’d be worn out in a week. It literally generates electricity from your body. So they engineered it to only activate for a burst at a certain trigger.”
“What’s the trigger?” Ana asked.
“You see someone you love die,” Gabriel says.
Ana just stares and so Jack speaks up. “We think it’s supposed to be like, when you’re on the battlefield, and people around you are falling,” he says. “Lets you do the impossible. A hail mary sort of thing, it only goes off when things are really bad. Because it does really take it out of you.”
Ana turns to him. “So you’ve…”
Jack looks down. Ana winces. Of course he has. No one in this camp hasn’t. She took this offer in no small part because her squadron had more ghosts than the living, at this point.
Gabriel puts his arm around Jack. Pulls him close and kisses the top of his head. “It’s gotten us out alive,” he says quietly. “So I can’t really complain, I guess.” Jack nods and closes his eyes, leaning into Gabriel.
It activates for Ana not long after that conversation, which isn’t really a surprise. Especially not when her job is to survey the battleground, and so she can see in crystal-clear detail when Rema– one kid but she wanted another, hated the smell of Febreeze, loved dry ramen– is shot in the back and crumples over.
Ana can’t quite piece together what happened next, in what order. She knows she mantled out of her sniper’s perch and ran towards Rema’s body. She knows she cleared a trench in a single jump to get there. She knows when she got there, she picked up Rema’s rifle and shot ceaselessly, carelessly, at the metal that advanced on her.
She doesn’t remember how Gabriel got to her, or how he got her to drop the gun or Rema’s hand. Her memories start to clear up when they’re sitting in a bunk that night. Jack is on his other side and Ana swears she can feel his warmth too. Gabriel puts his arm around her and she leans into him.
The next day, she finds a long, blackish stripe on her forearm. Gabriel and Jack show her some of their own– on Gabriel’s back and bicep, on Jack’s calf and stomach. They call them scars, but Ana can tell that wasn’t really what it was. It’s like a bruise, but more defined and enduring. Dark coloration lacing just under skin. It’s not painful, Gabriel tells her. But when Ana looks at his markings, looking like distended veins but carrying no blood, she swears she can see them bulging his skin.
“Can they be removed?” Ana asks Gabriel. He shakes his head.
“They tried to cut one out of Jack once,” he says. “But when they scraped off the skin, it just blew away. Looked like smoke.”
“And then it regrew?” Ana asks.
“And then it regrew.”
-
Jack and Gabriel are in love, and are terrible at hiding it.
They grab MREs from the canteen and then run like schoolchildren to some copse of trees and eat there, pretending like they can’t hear the noises of camp just a kilometer or so away. They always share a tent and their supersoldier frames have found a way to cram into a single sleeping bag. One time when they find an abandoned shopping mall Ana catches Jack Morrison, the boy scout, pocketing some cologne from a kiosk. Gabriel smells unpleasantly good that night.
It’d be obnoxious, if Ana didn’t love them both. They make each other happy. Ana loves them and they love her without any of the sneaking or intolerable sappiness, but she doesn’t begrudge them their love. What the three of them have makes her happy.
It doesn’t last. Gabriel calls for the evacuation of an Omnica compound where some troops have been pinned down. He’s supervising the perimeter with Ana, picking off Omnic sentinels that try to interfere. Ana watches Jack and a team of three soldiers go in. Ana sees Jack come out, crackling with electric energy. She sees Gabriel turn and look at him. She sees the anger in Jack’s eyes, sees Gabriel run towards him, trying to help. She can’t hear Jack scream.
Jack’s scar shows up through his eyes. Ana wakes up in the middle of the night to moans coming from the med tent, clearing trying to be muffled, clearly failing. When she gets there Gabriel’s sitting at a chair at Jack’s bedside. Gabriel’s staring at the door Ana enters, but she quickly realizes he’s not seeing her.
Jack sees again. They deaden the nerve endings in his eyes and that takes away everything, including the pain. They fit him with a visor they say will help him be even better in combat than he was before. They seem quite proud of themselves.
Gabriel breaks up with Jack soon after that. Jack seemed to know it was coming, but couldn’t bring himself to do anything about it one way or the other. When Ana visits him he just sits with her, wordlessly gumming at the sandwich she put in front of him.
“He was right,” Jack says finally. “It’s for the best.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Ana says.
“It is,” Jack says, and it’s the first time he’s broken from a monotone. “We get this close, in a time like this, when he’s my CO– we’ll just hurt each other. We’ll just get each other killed. I don’t want that.”
Ana knows Jack and Gabriel can’t stop being close, just like that. But she also knows Jack’s telling the truth right now. And she gets it. She would kill to have something that would lessen, even the slightest bit, the pain of the surge of rage, the ache of the scar.
Ana doesn’t get that. Ana sees everything, through the scope of her sniper rifle. She’s told to ride out her rages in her perch. That she’s more useful up there, watching, than down amongst the corpses.
Jack keeps his visor at his bedside and wears it every time he’s near something even approaching combat. But whenever he can, he goes around without it. Ana knows it’s because he hates feeling dependent on a piece of technology that could be taken from him so easily. She also knows Gabriel thinks Jack does it to punish him. She knows how much the sight of Jack’s scar hurts him.
-
The three of them are all in the same room when the footage from Mina’s Singapore lab comes in. They all light up in crackling, sparking energy when they watch Mina’s body fly out. The camera’s at a distance, Ana imagines Gabriel and Jack just see a body. But her bionic eye lets her see Mina’s frightened face and when she grips the table, Gabriel and Jack know.
As they sit there, glowing and silent. Before, Ana’s only ever had this activated on the battlefield. But in a quiet room with three still bodies, she realizes the energy sparking off of them makes noise. It sounds like sizzling.
The drug is supposed to let them do the impossible, Jack had said all those years ago. But right now Ana is just horribly aware of what is truly impossible. Impossible is idly talking with Mina before a meeting, finding out about the movie Mina had mentioned offhand last week, asking Mina for advice about Fareeha like Ana had been so afraid of doing. There is no strength, no speed, no anger in the world that can make any of that happen now. They are the most powerful people in the world and bringing Mina back is impossible for them and that is enraging.
Ana looks away from the footage of fleeing Talon soldiers. Jack is still alight but Gabriel has gone dark. Ana watches a scar form on Gabriel, crawling up his neck, splitting his lips, perfectly tracing the ridge of his nose. The black discoloration bubbles up in this silky way that reminds Ana so much of smoke rising from an extinguished candle. It’s a sickening process to watch and Ana realizes Gabriel must have seen it before, sitting at Jack’s bedside as Jack lost his sight.
Jack’s gotten more comfortable with the visor over the years, becoming more confident that his old SEP officers aren’t going to barge into his office and confiscate it. He’s wearing it now. He just sits at the head of the table, staring at the screen and Ana and Gabriel.
Gabriel’s the one who breaks the silence. “I told you to let me send people in,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “We knew Talon would be in Singapore. I told you we needed to hit them before they hit us.”
“I couldn’t,” Jack says. “Not after what Faisal told us about the Thai government, thinking of pulling their support from the UN as a whole if we intervened in the region–“
“I’m not talking about the fucking U.N., I’m talking about Mina!” Gabriel slams his hands down on the table as he stands. The scar is branching now, and its children have crawled all over his face. They pulse and it looks like a great claw flexing its grip into Gabriel. He stares at Jack. With the visor on, Ana can’t tell if Jack’s meeting his gaze. “We have to fucking do something,” Gabriel says. “We have to make them pay.”
“That’s not going to fix anything,” Ana says, and Gabriel swings his head to look at her. She doesn’t miss the hurt in his eyes, before they get cold and angry again.
“I know,” Gabriel says, in a slow, condescending tone, like Ana’s only disagreeing with him because she’s just too stupid. “I don’t care about fixing things. I just want to ruin them.”
“Mina would want to fix things,” Ana tells him, and there’s the hurt and the anger, all at once. He turns from Ana like he’s been struck, back to face Jack.
“You’re not going to counterstrike?” Gabriel asks him. Jack silently shakes his head. “Fucking fine. I’ll handle it myself.”
Ana and Jack are going to have to handle that, keep Gabriel from ruining all the precious trust they’ve managed to salvage and save from the international community. But right now Ana can’t do anything but just sit there, her nerves on fire, as Gabriel walks out of the room.
A few months later, Ana and Jack are leading a hostage recovery mission. When she sees Singh and Kimiko fall, almost simultaneously, Ana ignites. She leaps from the building she’s posted in and barely registers the impact. She chases the sniper through the compound, ignoring Jack’s yelling in her ear. He should know better by now.
She lands a disarming shot on the Talon sniper, and lines up the killing blow. When she sees Amélie Lacroix’s face, it all comes together. Why they never found her body, why there were no leads on Gérard’s killer, how Amélie “escaped” Talon’s clutches.
Ana is scoped in on Amélie and the split second before Amélie pulls the trigger, Ana could swear she sees a black scar wrapping around Amélie’s forearm.
Ana falls to the ground as the round embeds itself in her skull. Her communicator lies shatter beside her, slowly drowning in blood. She feels all of the rage but no jolt of superhuman energy. No power. She just lies there clutching her ruined eye.
-
When Ana finds Jack later, he’s covered in new scars. It makes her realize that the only ones she has he wouldn’t be familiar with are the ones from Kimiko and Singh. The five years they haven’t seen each other, Ana traveled for a while, then settled in the City of the Dead. The only people she saw die were criminals she had no attachment to. Jack, she knows, watched their legacy and everyone who helped them build it go up in flames. She doesn’t know who should be envious of whom.
Jack’s still so impulsive, so loyal, so dogged. But he’s different from how Ana left him too. Maybe it’s just around her. But Jack used to think through a situation aloud with her, counting on her feedback and opinions to lead him where he needed to go. Now, he seems content to follow her.
“I looked for you,” Jack tells her one night. They’ve left Egypt and are staying in an abandoned warehouse in Istanbul as they decide their next move. Ana’s wrapped up in blankets and Jack’s just wearing his stupid nylon jacket and her scarf to keep warm. He says he doesn’t mind the cold. He didn’t want to give Ana back her scarf.
“You told me,” Ana says. Jack shakes his head.
“I mean– Gabe sent McCree, we sent whole squads looking for you. But they gave up. But I didn’t. Once I got my gear– I kept looking for you. I knew you were out there, somewhere.”
Jack’s visor is lying at his side. They unrolled their sleeping bags near an electric heater and he’s staring at it like it’s a campfire. “How did you know?” Ana asks softly.
“I watched her fire on your position,” Jack says, “and I didn’t get a scar.”
“Maybe it’s just because you didn’t see my body.”
“No,” Jack says.
“Is that how you knew Gabriel was alive, too?”
Jack’s hand goes up to his chest and splays across it. “No,” he says.
They’re both quiet for a few minutes. Then Jack says, “Do you want to find him, too?”
“Yeah,” Ana says.
“You don’t seem as… I don’t think enthusiastic is the right word, is it?”
Ana smiles and shakes her head and then, remembering Jack can’t see her, says, “No.”
“You don’t talk about wanting to find him, I guess. And you weren’t trying to find him before I found you.”
Ana could point out that she had no way of knowing either Gabriel or Jack were alive. But she had known, deep down. And she wants to tell Jack the truth. So she rolls over to face him and says, “I was scared.”
“Scared of Gabriel?”
“No. Sort of.”
“Scared of me?”
“Not like– scared-scared,” Ana says. “But I just– I couldn’t, Jack.” Jack is silent, his scarred-over eyes listing above her head. “There was so much everyone needed from me and I couldn’t do it. And I didn’t want to face how badly I’d let you all down.”
“You didn’t.”
Ana doesn’t want to argue with Jack. She rolls back over. But from the side of her vision, she sees Jack reaching out towards her. She lets him take her hand.
“I fucked up,” Jack says. “I wasn’t there for you like I should have been. I didn’t help you when I needed to. I’m sorry. I’m going to try to make it up to you.”
Jack squeezes her hand. Ana swallows thickly. “It’s alright,” she says.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you don’t want to find Gabriel–“
“I do,” Ana says. She squeezes Jack’s hand, and he nods.
“I do too,” he says. “But I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
They lie there and after a while, Jack’s breathing deepens into snores. Ana doesn’t let go of his hand. For the first time in years, she doesn’t feel alone, and she feels like she has a purpose.
It might be impossible. But Ana knows they’re going to try to save Gabriel.
She doesn’t want to be angry at him.