Chapter Text
Consciousness slips back to him like a tide; surging forth and waning back, rising and falling, lingering at the edges of his awareness. Light and sound, indecipherable, slide past him without pause, without consideration for his sluggish wit. Outside of his grasp, every word spoken, every touch, every sliver of light or color blends into a cacophony that batters him.
It hurts.
It's unnecessary.
It starts with fire erupting in the right side of his skull and a face twisted with pain and horror and blood. The crack of a pulse rifle ringing in his ears, sending another deluge of agony from deep within his head through the rest of his body as he hits the ground. From the awkward angle at which his head is turned, he watches his mask clatter to the pavement, broken and stained black. The resulting pain leeches up from his bones, leaving every sinew of muscle awash with it. It started there. In his head. In his skull. All over. There's no pinpoint because it's everywhere.
Impossibly, already prone on the ground, he dives headfirst into darkness.
Minutes, hours, an eternity later, the fringes of his existence dissolve and reform, clouding the air and breaking his body to pieces. He feels solid, still, somehow, but blurring at the edges. A solid grip yanks at the edges of his coat, shaking him. His head lolls to the side, eyes locked onto a vast expanse of blue and grey.
"Piece of shit!"
The words hardly register, as blurred and faint as he feels. Just as he is, though, they are wholly present and clear, somewhere. But just as he is, they're broken and hazy. His body jerks, moved by an outside force.
"Using his face!"
Shapes and colors swim above him, haloed by light and sky and the blocky outlines of the compound's outbuildings. Red and blue have him seized by his coat, pried away by silver and black and green.
"This is counterproductive. He is dead now."
The red and blue counters, "Not walking away from this OP empty handed. We're taking this thing back with us."
The darkness engulfs him again. It's him, he thinks. The smoke that is him. That seethes beneath his skin and makes him weightless, formless. It's not him. It pulls him down, down, down into the earth. Glides low, under the frantic chatter and senseless words flying over his head. The tide lulls and sweeps him out to sea, but he doesn't drown. It's cold and strong and unforgiving in its nature, but he doesn't drown. Doesn't inhale or sink any further than he already has. The next one brings him to a mass of grey and a mechanical hum he vaguely recognizes as an MV-261 dropship. Amidst it all, a soft voice hums, he isn't dead, to another, gruffer, chagrined protest, it has no heartbeat.
The darkness falls again with as little warning as before. If he were lucid, he may have come to expect it by now. Abrupt and merciless as it is, it pulls him back under before he can make sense of what's around him, only slacking on its pull once another indeterminate amount of time has passed. It draws him up this time, slowly and then all at once.
It hurts.
It still hurts.
It's a merciless pull from the comfort of nothingness. Terrible and cruel. It comes with a new pain, a pinprick inside his head, burning like before but searing deep, deeper than it ever has. There are hands and words and tubes and wires and when he tries to swing, his body will not obey. His arms strain against some invisible force and his head thumps backwards onto something firm and cold.
There's an awful amalgamation of white noise and shrill ringing in his ears. It hurts just as much as everything else.
Metal clatters to a hard floor, and whoever had been speaking above him slides backwards, too far to reach. Too far to see anything other than a blur of human-shaped colors that reel back at his gaze.
"He shouldn't be awake!"
"No, but he is. Reaper – "
That doesn't sound quite right.
"Reaper, can you understand me?"
Again, he tries to move. This time registers a tug at both wrists. Pressure snug around each forearm, clasping both in place with no give. The development sends a stab of panic through him. The metal frame of the cot he's strapped to creaks and groans as he pulls, but the restraints remain stubbornly intact. To his left, someone steps near the head of the cot and a syringe consolidates clearly in his vision, poised to jab into his neck.
He jerks his head to the side, ignoring how the tubes in his arms and his nose and down his throat pull painfully where they snake through his body. He starts to dissolve, but the first voice, the one that didn't dip backwards out of reach, appears right above him.
The white noise fades, the ringing dulls. The voice that didn't dip away out of fear appears above him, belonging to a familiar face that has no right to be as calm and collected as she is.
"Reaper, stay with us please. I need you to stay together."
He focuses on her. He can see her clear as day right now. Whatever recognition she sees in his eyes relaxes her. Still, he can feel his cells tearing away from his body. It still won't permit him escape from the binds.
"Are you with me?"
He looks around, a task which resolves to be as difficult as possible.
The other presence shelters somewhere he can't see now. "Shit. Doctor Zeigler, he's not going to stay together at this rate."
A pause follows. He can still see the syringe. Zeigler's eyes trail after his gaze and the instrument is promptly set aside, just out of view.
"Reaper, I'm going to administer anesthetic. You've already burned through what we gave you, so it is imperative – gottverdammt."
He doesn't feel the jab, but amidst his now virulent struggling he begins to feel… heavier. The monotonous grey of the walls melds into jagged chunks of wreckage, jutting out in all directions. Pieces of concrete and rebar are what pin him down, and beneath him is an uneven, blocky bed of rubble instead of a cold, jarring operating table. The sterile white ceiling darkens to smoke blotted sky, and the lights shine as arcing electricity and sparks raining down from destroyed conduits and dangling wires.
Warmth washes through his limbs, floods his chest and fogs his head. It's not the heat of a fire searing through his veins. It's pleasant, almost. Beckoning to a void. The mechanical hum reverberating through the air is dull and rhythmic. It isn't the roar of an explosion, nor the resulting blaze. It's an engine. A dropship. He's on board a dropship, strapped down in a medical bay.
The rubble morphs into a slurry of grey and white and the struggle bleeds out of him. The person nearest him – had he heard the other voice right? is it Zeigler? – is muttering strained platitudes. There, just let the medicine work.
The sedatives don't pull him under fully, but they bury sensation under a nice, heavy blanket and blot out the pain.
"Take a look at this scan and tell me you see what I'm seeing…" the unfamiliar voice says, close enough to distinguish the sound from the incomprehensible clamor of the rest of the dropship.
"Inorganic mass on the right frontal lobe. Could it be the bullet?"
"Maybe. Shape isn't quite right, though. And the angle Jack – "
Jack?
The voices quieten. Silence hangs in the air. They shuffle away. He can almost feel the wary gaze that grazes over him. "The angle he described… the bullet shouldn't have lodged in him. It's somewhere in that courtyard."
There's a disconcerted sigh. "Once we can keep his form stable longer than five minutes, I'll be able to see if the wound has exposed the mass. It needs to be removed regardless."
Reaper drifts on the tide, caught between alert and that enticing, unattainable unconsciousness; jolted periodically from the fog by words close to his head and turbulence that rattles the dropship.
"How's Cass?"
Cass?... Cassidy.
Cassidy?
The person nearby – speaking – their breath hitches. Whatever reaction he's had has caught them off guard. A twitch of his head, maybe. He knows the restraints are still in place and his body is still mostly solid. Their hesitation passes roughly once they're assured he's still thoroughly subdued. The voice is achingly familiar. In the back of his mind, shielded from the present, it demands him to keep your eyes open. Look at me. Please just look at me. No, no, please – please don't –
Cole is here too? Whe – where is he?
Zeigler's voice swoops through the memory, dragging him back abruptly. "Sedated at the moment, but he'll be fine in a few days."
"And Reaper?"
Reaper? Reaper loses focus. More of him dissolves, but too much stays solid. Too… too much. He can't –
He opens his eyes.
The floor beneath the cot is unmoving and the thrum of the dropship's engines is glaringly absent, replaced by the din of medical equipment and the stench of antiseptic. Above his head, there's a silhouette haloed by a blinding white light. Pain lances through his skull and the figure above him freezes. The pain fades to a dull throb.
His limbs do not respond to his brain's signals to move. To get up. Instincts all but screaming out loud this is an operating theater, you need to get up, you need to get away.
He sees blonde hair, not red.
There's a voice, addressing him, but the words are indistinguishable from the machines and the ringing in his ear. He fades again, eyes sliding closed against his will. It never ends. The tide pulls him under and never lets him breathe. It clamps down and and pins him in place and holds him under the surf until it retreats back just far enough for him to glimpse the sky.
Until suddenly, with little grace and no warning, he breaks the surface and steals a lungful of air. Of sterile, cold, recycled air. Reaper's eyes fly open to meet a grey ceiling and dimmed, fluorescent lights. He tests his fingers first, curling them against the mattress under his body experimentally. The texture of the sheet and the stiffness of the pad confirm what his limited visibility thus far cannot: he's laid out on some kind of hospital bed.
It's… not comfortable in the least, but it's much better than he's used to. Talon never spares luxury to its assets, but here he is, weak and vulnerable on a real hospital bed instead of a threadbare cot. That alone raises alarm bells.
"That thing isn't him."
His every sense zeroes in on that voice.
Gabe, look at me. It's okay, it's okay. Help is coming.
One can only dream.
"We ran the blood panel six times to be sure. It is him."
"It's Talon's pet project parading around in his corpse then, but it. isn't. him."
His body is slow to respond as the panic begins to mount, urging him to do something to get out before they can come in and exploit his weakness, but he can barely lift his head, barely curl his fingers. He's useless to leave, let alone fool anyone into thinking he's mission-ready.
"He's waking up."
They both fall silent, surveying from a direction he can't see as he tries and fails to drag himself out of the leaden bleariness that's glued him to the bed. He manages a turn of his head, revealing that the far wall of the room is wall to ceiling glass that separates him from a larger medical bay. Standing on the other side of it are his quiet observers. Two familiar faces that spell nothing but trouble.
Or… a familiar face and a familiar visor.
The visor that Reaper recognizes as the face of the new Overwatch's attack dog. The man that interfered on too many of his missions, ruined too many of his objectives.
And Zeigler. It's no surprise she'd fallen into step with Overwatch again. Their presence quickly dashes the illusion that Talon has reclaimed him for a new experiment, but he suspects his current circumstance would really be no better.
He dissolves.
It's no difficult task now, and he vanishes into a plume of black smoke that coils up to the ceiling. Up to the air recycler that he definitely won't be able to escape through. It just cleans up whatever air he breathes out and pumps it back into the room, good as new. No ventilation to the outside.
Situated in the wall, to the left side of the door, there's a short metal table. On the other side, outside, there's a box with a door shut tight and a complex locking mechanism. Where food and supplies can be passed through with a minimal risk of danger or exposure. A meal slot, essentially. A plastic partition that starts at the floor and stops just short of the ceiling divides a washroom area from the rest of the room. It's small, only fit for a toilet, a shower stall, and a sink.
Behind the Zeigler and 76 are more glass walls and equipment, a decontamination anteroom, beyond which lays the actual medbay. A quarantine suite. They've done their homework.
The smoke billows down to floor level, testing the seam between floor and glass, all along the wall and the door. Zeigler and 76 remain silent as he attempts his escape. His efforts yield no results so he tests the wall itself, battering against it until every cell that forms him is seared with pain and he drops to the floor, solid once again.
He stops shouting only once he realizes he ever started. The rasp of his voice sounded hollow, belying the fear laced through his body. Something isn't right.
"Reaper, can you hear me?"
Zeigler's voice is tinny over the intercom.
"Do you know where you are?"
An airtight box with no way out, surrounded by the enemy? He can barely keep his form together, let alone string together a coherent sentence. Zeigler's voice comes through the speaker again, "Reaper?"
He looks down at his hands, where his palms had been pressed onto the tile, holding him up, and sees smoke. Overwatch, he starts to say.
"...'watch" is all he manages to croak out.
"You've been here for three days. You were injured in the field and scans showed a concerning mass in your brain. Upon extraction, we discovered it to be a biochip. An inhibitor of some kind. The disorientation you're feeling is normal and will start to ease soon."
The words crawl over him, but the exertion of the escape attempt has left him too sluggish to care for the revelation. Instead, he focuses on what parts of him are still solid and notes that his gear is gone and replaced with a standard hospital gown. They've taken all of it. Nothing of his is left, which means –
He slides a half formed hand up to his face, resting a palm over bare skin. The faceplate isn't there. They've taken it too. Left him with nothing.
"...Mask," he rasps, clutching his hand over his face. He can't stop the tremor that seizes his fingertips, nails pressing crescent indentations into his grey tinged complexion.
After a stilted silence, Zeigler says, "It was ruined when you were injured."
This time, he demands it, "My mask."
Zeigler sighs and shuffles away from the glass. 76 balks. "You can't be considering this, doc."
"Until we know more about the chip, I can't do much else. This could help him."
The reformation as a solid body doesn't last long and the rest of him falls apart once more, leaving a roiling mass of smoke to idly pace the length of the room. He floats up high, closer to the ceiling, to peer over their heads into the medbay. Nothing but more equipment. Cots. Opaque glass doors beneath a sign marking them as the exit into the main section of the medbay. His belongings are nowhere to be seen.
"Do you remember what happened?" Zeigler questions, keeping her focus locked firmly on his movements.
He continues searching the room for weak points. Tools. There's nothing useful.
Three days is apparently plenty of time to plan ahead.
"Reaper," she presses. He stops, hovers indistinctly near where 76 still stands. Finally, he answers, the echo of a pulse rifle ringing in his ears.
"You," he accuses.
"If only," 76 grumbles.
The smoke barrels into the glass with a furious roar. He feels a pang of satisfaction when 76 takes a measured step back. Zeigler hasn't flinched, composure unshaken by the cloud of decaying cells throwing itself at the wall.
"We'll let you rest," she says, gripping 76 by his shoulder to turn him around. The glass fogs over, blocking out most of the light from the medbay. He pulls himself together, slumping against the far wall to watch the door, stubbornly refusing to let the heaviness in his eyes win. He's slept for three days. He's slept enough.
Even so, he curses internally when he wakes with a stiff neck and an ache in his head. The lights are still dimmed, and through the nearly opaque glass he can see that the medbay has dimmed as well. He scans the room – his cell – for any further hint, but with a clearer head, he realizes that it's threadbare of equipment, and there most certainly isn't even a clock.
From the speaker, a soft voice chimes, "You're awake."
This one sounds vaguely familiar, but he can't place it to a face.
"The time is 0445. You have been asleep since 1723. Doctor Zeigler has left some things for you. You will find them in the drop box beside the door."
Just like that, the electronic hum coming through the speaker silences. He pushes up off the wall and stands. Across the room, he indeed finds that there's a mass of fabric sitting atop the metal table, folded neatly and stacked on the narrow platform. On top, he finds his mask. It's missing a piece near the top edge and the jagged material splinters into cracks that web across the surface.
The broken part has been filed down, leaving it dull instead of sharp, and when he applies pressure to it, the cracks don't worsen or break open. Under the mask are clothes. Plain scrubs and a hoodie that's missing the drawstring, but they're clothes and they're better than this godforsaken paper gown. He's quick to discard the offending garment, pulls the hood up over his head, and locks the mask into place.
It feels ridiculous to have it now.
But without it he feels exposed.
Before his aching body can protest any further, he settles back against the wall, facing the door, and waits. He dozes some, but refuses to succumb fully. Eleven hours is enough.
Another hour passes by his estimation, and the light behind the fogged glass brightens as footsteps sound through the room. The door to the decontamination hisses open and a shadow mills around, lingering in front of the drop box before a shrill beep rings through the locking mechanism. Something solid lands inside the box, the outer door closes noisily, and the beep intones again, signaling the inner door to open as well, revealing –
A tray of food. It's just… food.
Reaper can't see it from where he sits, but he can smell it. Plain eggs and sausage. There's a plastic cup full of what appears to be orange juice beside the plate. It isn't a particularly strong scent but it's still strong enough to make him retch as he fumbles for the mask, attempting to engage the filter that – fuck, it's gone. They took the damn thing apart and gave it back without the goddamn filter –
Outside, he hears, "What the fuck?!"
Two pairs of footsteps rush back into decontamination and light floods the room as the glass returns to a transparent state, but Reaper has already dematerialized and drifted to the far corner, as far from the offending tray of food as he can reach. Zeigler and 76 watch like he's a zoo animal.
"It's not poisoned," 76 snaps.
Zeigler strides to the meal slot and closes the inner door, cutting off the source of the stench. Cooly, she asks, "Reaper, are you able to eat?"
"No," his disembodied voice answers sharply.
"I… apologize for the oversight. Is there anything we can do?"
"Out."
"Not a chance in hell," 76 cuts in. When the outer door on the slot opens, Zeigler plucks the tray up and mumbles something to 76 as they make their exit. The subtleness is wasted. His senses are still as finely tuned as they were six years ago. Dying hasn't changed that.
"He's… not alive. It's likely that his body can't process food anymore; it would be painful. I didn't wish to deprive Reaper of a basic necessity if my suspicions were wrong."
"What now?"
"You have the footage?"
A pause. 76's rough voice prompts, "Athena."
Athena. He remembers her now. It was her voice on the intercom earlier. Swiftly, she responds, "The data has been transferred to your tablet, Dr Zeigler."
"Danke, Athena."
Reaper tracks their movements across the medbay. Zeigler occasionally glances to where the smoke has settled in the corner, but 76 is all but glaring his way. He stays put as the doctor walks off to part of the medbay that Reaper can't observe and returns thirty five seconds later with a datapad in her hands, walking straight into decontamination without waiting for her watchdog.
76 strides through at Zeigler's heel, hovering a few feet away once she stops at the wall that separates Reaper from them.
"Yesterday I asked if you remembered what happened to you."
He drifts away from the corner, towards the glass, and Zeigler hums, "And let me be clear, it wasn't 76."
Reaper hmphs.
"Overwatch," he spits. If she's bothered at all by the gravel emanating from the mass of smoke, she doesn't let it show. Hidden behind the mask and visor, he pictures hard-set anger on 76's face.
"Talon shot you."
Reaper's smoky form stutters, caught off guard.
"We pulled footage from the compound."
The smoke twists erratically, drifting away from the glass.
"Your pals didn't appreciate you deviating from the mission," 76 grumbles. Zeigler shoots him a look that ultimately has no effect.
She takes a deep breath, holding her datapad up to the glass. On the screen is security footage from the compound. Where it happened. He watches his failure unfold from different angles, each scene cut together into one continuous video for the sake of brevity.
"We want to know why. Why you deviated from their mission. If you can't remember, maybe this will help. If it becomes too much, just tell me and we'll stop," she says softly. Reaper draws back in, still not corporeal but focused, at least, on the screen being presented to him.
He sees himself throw one of his own snipers from a roof then wraith down to ground level, and –
There… there's Cole.
Taking cover behind a half collapsed wall, riddled with bullet holes. Dying, bleeding out, watching him with confusion and fear and looking all but dead where he's crumpled on the ground. He hears a gunshot and watches himself collapse, mask clattering to the pavement, smeared with blood and skull fragments. He hears the crack of a pulse rifle and a bodily thud as something, somebody, hits the ground off screen. The footage switches to a wide shot of the courtyard, in which Reaper can see his own body laid out on the ground. A few meters behind him is a Talon agent, dead at 76's feet.
Reaper had thrown one of his own agents from a rooftop. Without hesitation. Saw them raise their rifle, barrel aimed over the parapet. Moments away from putting a bullet between Cole's eyes.
In retaliation, another shot him in the head.
At that moment, 76 came upon the scene and shot that agent in return. These things are all very clear for him to see now.
All he can focus on is Cole, dying right in front of him. As soon as all that chaos began, it ended, with Cassidy collapsing fully on the debris of the destroyed wall.
"Hijo," he says.
76 sucks in a breath and stalks out of the decontamination room. The doctor huffs and mutters under her breath in german. Reaper returns to flowing back and forth along the length of the room. Her eyes track the movement and her features soften.
"76 thought it was Agent Cassidy who shot you."
He peers up at her, questioning.
"He's okay, thanks to you."
He's shocked at the relief that washes through him, reforming somewhat to sit on the floor. Tendrils of smoke still rise up into the air – parts of him less solid than others – but keeping together is less of a chore.
"You saved his life."
Silence falls upon the medbay, disturbed only by the methodical prattle of the equipment and Zeigler's own breathing and 76's palpable aggravation, hushed cursing and furious pacing, in whatever part of the medbay Zeigler retrieved the datapad from.
"I also told you we found a biochip. Do you know anything about it?"
Talon's pet project, 76 had said.
How true that is.
Something is different. Something is missing. But it doesn't feel… wrong. A weight has been lifted, one he hadn't felt in the first place. That Talon might have put something in his head doesn't surprise him. That its absence might be the very thing that he's feeling even less so.
In his hands, his head shakes. No, he hadn't known. He wouldn't have been permitted to know. The pieces start falling into place.
The glow from the datapad vanishes as the device is tucked under Zeigler's arm. Reaper can feel her gaze boring into him.
Finally, she breaks the silence. "Do you need anything?"
Quickly and a little too sharply he responds, "Go."
She sighs. "Of course. We've done enough for now. A datapad will be ready for you soon."
He says nothing, but she doesn't wait for an answer. The doors to decontamination slide open to allow her exit, snapping shut again behind her. Once she's gone, he rises up from the floor and pads over to the partition that separates the wash area from the rest of the room. Upon closer inspection of the nook, he finds that bottles of generic, unscented body wash and shampoo have been left on the back of the toilet, toothpaste, mouthwash, and a brush have been left at the sink, and a pair of towels and washcloths are draped over a rod that's bolted to the wall. Above the sink, there's no mirror, but there's very clearly meant to be. The hooks it was mounted on are still there.
Idly, he reaches up to the decorative rings where the drawstrings of his hoodie are meant to pull through. The garment is stiff and clean in a way that only something new can be, yet the cord is still missing.
And so is the mirror.
He wants nothing more than to shatter what's left of his mask by throwing it at the tile wall as he unclasps it, but instead, he carefully sets it on the shelf above the sink, beside the toothpaste. Then he discards the hoodie and scrubs on the floor and attempts to drown himself under the lukewarm spray of the shower.
He fails. Unsurprisingly. But the complimentary soap and shampoo wards off the oddly grimey sensation that clung to him without pervading his every sense. Once he redresses, he re-emerges from the wash area, eyes drawn immediately to the drop box by the door. There's another set of clothes, and on top, there's a datapad nestled snugly in a protective silicone case, as promised.
He picks it up, frowning at the Overwatch emblem mocking him from the idle screen, and perches on the bed to read.
Reaper jolts awake to a knock sounding on the glass, which compels the datapad to slide from his loose grip onto the bed. He'd fallen asleep, apparently, propped against the wall behind the bed reading Pedro Páramo, trying to keep himself occupied in this goddamn prison cell of a hospital room. He sucks in a breath, one he doesn't need but instinct draws in anyway, eyes darting to the two figures about to enter the room.
"I can handle this on my own. I don't need your helicoptering."
"I don't doubt you for a second, Angie. It's that thing that I don't trust."
It's 76 and Doctor Zeigler. It's just them. Angela is unarmed, but there's no reason for 76 to be suited up. There's no pulse rifle, but Reaper knows that coat conceals any manner of other weapons and tools. It sets him on edge.
"Reaper, I've gotten some information about the biochip I need to discuss with you. I'd also like to do a checkup now that you're able to maintain consciousness," Zeigler says, as they cross the threshold into the room.
76 steps in behind her.
In a flash, the room morphs into a cell. Dank, grey walls, metal door, a grinning doctor and an armed, masked agent stare back at him, frozen to the meager cot that offers no comfort. He lurches back, stumbling off the side of the bed.
The agent is quick to put himself between Reaper and the doctor. Smoke roils off of Reaper and he backs along the wall until his shoulder hits the corner. Instead of advancing on him, weapon drawn, the agent stops. The doctor yanks him backward, hissing something that prompts a partial retreat. The man backs away carefully, hesitates, then backs through the door once it slides open behind him.
The doctor inches closer, lifting both hands in a placating gesture. The sadistic smile is gone, replaced by a measured calm and blue eyes brimming with concern. Blue, they're blue. Softer and kinder.
Sound bleeds back into existence, bringing with it her gentle reassurances. In front of him is Angela. It's Angela. Not Talon. Not Moira. He blinks and sees the scientist anyway. Shakes his head. Tries to clear the image from his mind, but it hangs over him and taunts him.
Welcome back, Moira's voice hums in his ear.
There are hands in his chest. Bones broken, rebar piercing flesh. He shudders, pressing his hands into his face until painful impressions form under the edges of the mask. Blood dribbles from his mouth, dripping from the mask onto the floor between his feet.
There's no hands in his chest, ransacking his bones and shifting around his lungs and heart. Not anymore. But the blood continues to bubble up his throat. The walls around him shift from Talon's lab to burning rubble. A hand cradles his head. Alarms and sirens blare in the distance. A familiar voice rasps pleas, god no, please. no, look at me, don't do this to me.
"Angela," Reaper breathes, smoke wisping from his lips.
She's quiet for a moment, glancing down at the small puddle of darkened red that's gathering on the tile. The steady drip drip from beneath his mask. "I'm right here."
Warmth blooms across his chest and back, soaking through the hoodie. Angela glances down at it, alarmed.
"Angela… help."
Her breath hitches and she glances over her shoulder to the – glass – wall. On the other side of it, 76 is watching, tense and wired, but allowing a generous distance between himself and the door. Ready to pounce at the drop of a pin. It's 76. Not a faceless Talon grunt.
He looks up at the doctor again.
"Hurts…"
Angela lets out a shaky breath. "What hurts?"
"I can't," his voice catches. It sounds unnatural to his own ears. He sinks down to the floor, hand fisting into the damp fabric of the hoodie. Angela watches his hand, eyes widening a fraction in realization. She lowers down to the tile as well, settling on her knees with an arm's length between them.
Eyes flutter behind the mask. He can't breathe. He can't – It's like breathing through mud. He can't see anything but fire through the darkness in the rubble. It fades in and out in tune with his rasping attempts to draw air into his lungs, morphing from debris to plain grey walls. Blazing heat to cool, recycled air.
"Help is here, commander," she replies, carefully. "You can rest now."
Commander. That sounds wrong too. He nods, eyes drifting closed. A hand settles on his shoulder, warm and familiar, and he stills. Uncoils. Dissolves.
Angela looks over her shoulder. Through the glass, she and 76 exchange looks.