Chapter Text
This wasn’t the first time Junkrat had been down here.
Or at least it was damn familiar, - a deep hole, surrounded by rubble and rock and sharp, sharp metal bits sticking out like the quills of an angry porcupine. Watch your finger!
Pebbles tumbled down on top of him - onto his face, into his eyes - dust and who knows what else. But he didn’t look away, couldn’t look away. He know if he glanced down he would see missing limbs - blood and mangled metal and chunky bits. Instead, he was frozen, head turned to the sky like a dead bird, stiff on his back.
Birds circled overhead.
And the hole grew, the walls stretched up, up, up. He sunk ever lower.
There was something pressing down on him, and the smell - putrid, he remembers.
He felt his chest tighten, his heart beating faster. This wasn’t the first time, he knew that they are here and coming for him.
They are here! They are here! Phantom arms grab and pull at him. He is going down and deeper into the darkness as the hole above crumbles in. The only source of light was gone now leaving him in darkness and a misty gray haze. He will suffocate down here!
The rubble fell on him, burring him and pressing his chest into the hard ground underneath. Buried alive, dead, and gone and forgotten.
There was a thumping in his head - tick tock tick tock, time was running out. He tried to move but the phantom hands held him in place, no matter how much he struggled. The more he pulled the harder they held him.
He had to escape! He had to escape! He had to escape!
This wasn’t the first time he had been here. He knew what to do!
He wakes up with the vigor of a man in panic. Hands grasped the first thing that his railed mind could think of and grabbed a bomb off his west - it was laying just in arms reach - and flung it into the dark night.
Junkrat realized he was gasping for air.
Boom!
The whole of the Wasteland was lit up by the sudden flash of fire. His victim, a lone dry bush caught alight and started burning. What a laugh, he was giggling.
Roadhog jumped up beside him, it was his turn to keep watch. His hand was already on his hook the minute he saw Junkrat getting up. He must have thought that he heard something he didn’t, but then the bush burned and there was not a soul in sight.
“What the hell?”
“Got to start the morning bright, mate!” Junkrat giggled. Then laughed, then fell back with his legs kicking in the air - it wasn’t that fun. But he didn’t know what he was doing a moment ago.
Roadhog grunted. He got up; might as well break camp.
You didn’t need to be an observant individual to notice that there is something wrong with Junkrat.
Living through the absolute nightmare that the Omnium explosion turned the Outback into was enough to give anybody issues for a lifetime. Now add a great deal of radiation poisoning, and living among junkers to the mix and you have a recipe that makes up a portion of the Outback’s society. Not a huge part of it, mind you. People who get this bad usually don’t live long after. Radiation sickness takes them slowly. They die faster if there is nobody looking after them.
Modern medicine could clean up anything that the Outback could throw at you. But good luck getting your hand on anything like that around here. Towns on the edge of ‘civilized’ Australia long since learned to switch out their medicine with duds when they hear the loud motorcycles rolling in. All humanitarian efforts stopped ages ago and whatever the junkers cooked up as medicine was nothing more than snake oil.
How Junkrat made it so far was a miracle.
How he got this bad was also something that made people wonder as well.
It was best not to think about it. Junkers are very good at sweeping things under the rug. If it wasn’t going to knock down their door and demand life or money it could wait till the next day or the next, and so on.
All of this came down to now Roadhog having to deal with this mess of a human being Junkrat turned out to be.
Mostly it was easy. Junkrat did his own things and he was competent. He could steal, scavenge and kill whoever he needs to make it into the next day. Sure, he never shut up, and he craved attention like a lost puppy - and if that attention happened to be a bunch of assholes he could blow sky high then he was jumping off joy.
Once you got to know him you could learn that he was predictably unpredictable. It was silent for too long - Junkrat is going to do something. There was a deadly situation - Junkrat will do his best to make it deadlier. He was bored - ditto.
Roadhog learned to go with the flow.
Junkrat wasn’t the most malicious person life could have thrown together him with. He had known truly depraved people, and he had even killed a few. No, the younger junker was just, well, Junkrat.
What put him on edge was when Junkrat’s pattern of behavior took a dive in the other direction. When the manic energy is replaced with a long stare into the distance. When the constant stream of babbling about nothing turned into daft silence. And when he didn’t remember.
Junkrat had problems. Hell, everybody knew that.
Even so, Roadhog could deal with everything - the crazy, the quiet - it was only a matter of time and patience to learn how to navigate his partner’s quirks.
Really, swinging a bomb in the middle of the night wasn’t the most deranged thing Junkrat could have done the minute he woke up.
He was here before.
The scorching heat of the Outback was baking him dry and crisp, the landscape quivered around him as he stood on a heap of rubble. Trash for others, but for a junker of his caliber this was a treasure trove.
And he has staked his claim to it - it was a great tall hill of concrete, metal bars, and various sharp objects, the remains of an old building, maybe a factory. Of course, he wanted to dig around. Who wouldn’t?
He put down as many traps as he could manage - and could remember.
But he knew he is not alone. Nobody is truly alone in the Outback. If there was profit to be made or scrap to be stolen you can bet your ass that somebody come snooping around.
After all, he did the same.
He dug into the rubble, on top of the pile going down.
Bang!
The gunshot pierced through his prosthetic arm. The lucky shot went straight in between plating and shattering everything that came in its way. Wires flung out, mechanism turned to scrap.
His attacker arrives, climbing up and a gun aimed at him.
That won’t be that easy! He flung a bomb, but the fucker was clever in his own right - or crazy enough to do it. But he raised his gun and shot the bomb.
An explosion of light and noise, smoke and heat.
What a bloke! He would love to be friends if he wasn't trying to kill him. As it stood Junkrat threw a mine at the sharpshooter's feet and detonated.
The next thing he knew was that the ground falls away and he goes down into a cavern in the rubble.
It’s starting again!
His body hit the ground, his prosthetics were gone, and the rest of him burned and covered in shrapnel. Rubbel follows burring him in an avalanche. Whatever happened to his attacker, he didn’t know. But he hoped that he died, horribly. Maybe he was the chunks not far from him.
It serves him fucking right!
Nightmares came and went. Seemingly there was no rhyme or reason to them. Roadhog tried to predict them, if only for the sake of not being caught off guard when Junkrat suddenly jumps up and start throwing bombs in every which direction. He contemplated taking his stuff from him, just to prevent him from having a heart attack. But these nightmares were few and far between so he decided not to bother.
He sighed deeply. This was never a problem in the shack back in Junkertown. Maybe because Junkrat slept reasonably away from his hoard of explosives - or maybe he wasn't as on edge as out here in the middle of nowhere.
Roadhog was keeping watch again. Junkrat was sleeping peacefully on the other side of the camp.
It was shaping up for a quiet night.
Then Junkrat tenses up, Roadhog knew the signs. And he knew that there is little he could do. So he settled back and watched - at the moment Junkrat was the most dangerous thing in proximity.
He saw it coming when Junkrat jerked up and lobbed a bomb into the darkness. The explosion followed right after - as it should - then the junker would shake and start giggling.
It always went somehow like this whenever Junkrat woke up from a nightmare. At least, Roadhog assumed it was a nightmare - it would be a logical conclusion. Junkrat never talked about it, he would always forget about it - or pretend it didn’t happen. Roadhog wasn’t going to force it, he was in no place to help him. And people had nightmares, and junkers lived through enough to last a lifetime. It might be just a Junkrat-thing to throw bombs at them the moment his scrambled brain was kicked into consciousness.
“What a beauty! Eh?”
Roadhog often wondered why Junkrat did anything.
“Whot, mate?”
“...”
“Anyways, what’s for breakfast?” he was ready to jump up when Roadhog grunted at him.
“No breakfast, it’s still night.”
“Ohhhh, right, right, got you mate,” he giggled. “You want to switch? I’m wide awake now!”
“Sleep.”
He might have said that he was ‘wide awake’ but Junkrat fell asleep the moment his head hit the bag he used as a pillow. Roadhog sighed. At least he will have a nice night after - usually, that’s how it went. That done with, he can expect the night to continue on relatively undisturbed. He continued his watch, the Outback around them was silent. More so than before, an explosion tends to do that, it can even shock the night bugs into silence.
It was somewhat unnerving. Roadhog thought that he would welcome a little peace and quiet. But peace and quiet weren’t the same as the blanket of silence that draped over the Outback whenever it was disturbed.
He was too used to the constant chitter-chatter around him. The quiet now meant that something was wrong.
Something was wrong, that was the statement of a century.
He leaned against the boulder they set up camp at. The chirping of bugs soon returned to the Outback. He could relax again.