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"Come with me," Gabriel said.
Jack looked up, squinted over the top of a pair of coke-bottle-bottom glasses that Angela had badgered him into wearing. Made him look so goddamn old, moreso than the thinning silver hair and the stiffness in his back and his hands ever could. It was the ass-end of the middle of the night, edging into morning. No one was up and about but them, the old soldiers who'd forgotten how to sleep like normal people.
Gabriel scuffed a foot on the ground, frowning, averting his eyes, setting his jaw in a firm line. Anything to make it look like he was less of a fool for Jack Morrison's dumb face. "I wanna show you something," he said. "I won't take too much of your precious time, don't worry."
With a shrug, Jack set down his tablet and stood up from his cafeteria chair, wincing as his old joints creaked at the movement. "Not like I have anything better to do. Something wrong?"
Something was always wrong. If Gabriel went down the list of things that were wrong in his life he'd be there for hours. "You know better than to think I'd answer that," he said instead.
Jack chuckled. "Guess you're right." He didn't contest it beyond that, ducking his head, smiling. Stuffing his hands into his pockets with a shrug. "Lead the way."
They walked in silence through the halls of the watchpoint, no small talk, no idle chatter. Neither of them was the sort to try and fill space with words. They'd never learned how. Even before, when they had been... Something. Partners. Friends. Comrades. Lovers. Gabriel had never figured out what the right word was for two people who were wound up in each other so tightly that whenever they tried to pull apart, they took pieces of each other with them.
But that kind of bond made for tension when they were seperated. The kind of tension that two opposing magnets tended to have if you held them close but forcibly prevented them from sticking. It was exactly that sort of tension that filled the silence as they walked, drawn close to each other but still keeping just enough distance that they didn't quite touch. Maybe it was pride, maybe it was stubbornness. Gabriel didn't know. He just knew that both of them walked with their hands in their pockets, neither inviting any affection.
The tension made Gabriel feel like his skin was boiling, stress seeping into the smoke that made up his form. Another bulletpoint for the list of things that were wrong.
"This something I should bring my visor for?" Jack asked out of the blue.
Gabriel snorted. "Somehow I don't think you'll want to be looking at this through a red wash."
"I have a blue one."
"Not the point, old man."
"You're older than I am."
"I'm a cloud of nanotech in the shape of a corpse, Jack."
"So Angie says." Jack smirked in the face of Gabriel's deadpan look. "You know how much stock I put in her opinions, Gabe."
Gabriel wasn't impressed. "You should listen to her more. I could be taking you to an obscure corner of the base to kill you, away from that damn AI."
"Sounds like a good time." A grin pulled at Jack's scarred features. "Could use a good one-on-one sparring match. I feel kinda bad beating the new kids' asses."
It was fucking baffling just how much Jack trusted him. "Whatever," Gabriel huffed, turning away. "We're almost there."
Jack blinked. "Almost where? We're on the way to one of the server rooms."
"Yep."
"Okay...?" When Gabriel stopped in his tracks and looked up to observe a crack in the wall, it only seemed to confuse Jack further. "You've lost me."
Gabriel hummed, looping an arm around Jack's waist and making him sputter. "Figured I would. C'mere."
"Gabe, what the--"
"Hold on," Gabriel said. And then he shifted.
It wasn't pleasant. Getting the hang of shifting with clothing had been a chore in itself, doing so with a passenger even moreso. The first few times he'd done it in his early days, the test subjects he'd tried it on (no one he would miss, naturally) ended up a husk on the other end, or simply scattered into dust. Distance made it harder, drained him that much faster. He had to hold his shape, and hold the shape of the other person-- everything that made up the both of them, all of them having to be kept seperate from all of him.
He wouldn't have dared to do it at all if it weren't for the crack in the rocks, a crevice running all the way through to the top. Barely big enough for a mouse to fit through, but just enough for him to cut his time spent shifted in half if he ever had an occasion to want to perch on Gibraltar's peak.
They reformed in a cloud of black smoke a few hundred feet up from where they'd been, two seperate entities once more. Gabriel had to fight to keep his own shape contained, somewhat human, mostly-whole; most of his energy was spent making sure Jack was alright at the other end.
Even if alright meant that Jack was gasping and clutching tightly at the worn cotton of Gabriel's hoodie, pale as a sheet and sweating.
"Jesus," he croaked. "Warn a guy next time."
Gabriel had to laugh, even if he grit his teeth through it. "And miss an opportunity to screw with the great Jack Morrison? Never."
Jack coughed, breaking away. Doubling over, bracing his hands against shaking knees. "Shit. Is it always like that?"
"You get used to it."
"Sounds like getting used to waterboarding." Jack paused, barked a laugh. "Hah. It'd make one helluva interrogation technique, wouldn't it?"
Sure did. "You're getting morbid, Jack. I thought I was the one who came up with ideas like that."
"And you say I'm getting old? Here you are forgetting who gave the orders behind those ideas in the first place."
Gabriel huffed. Annoyance at Jack was not helping him to collect himself any better. "Just sit down before you fall down, you stubborn ass."
"Hah." Jack conceded that much, easing himself down with considerable stiffness. "You just don't want to think I knew what you were doing," he accused. "Doesn't fit in with your angsty self-loathing schtick."
"You're supposed to be trying to win me over, boy scout, not make me hate you even more."
"Maybe I want you to hate me. Fits the narrative better than--" Jack gestured to the scenery, the ocean, the sunrise, "--whatever the hell this is." His hand fell to the rock beneath him, and he went quiet for a few seconds. "...What is this, anyway?"
"A nice view," Gabriel replied, sounding bored. He plopped down next to Jack, cross-legged. Moody and smoking, barely human. Jack didn't seem intimidated; he didn't even seem to care. "One so blatant even you can see it."
Jack hummed, some of the tension leaving his shoulders as he took in his surroundings as well as his eyesight would let him. The horizon was a splash of color, vibrant against the retreating darkness. Gleaming over the sparkling water. "You can see Africa from here," he said after a while.
"Yeah." Gabriel didn't have to look to see that Jack was smiling. He could hear it in the man's voice, softening Jack's gravelly tone; he didn't dare look, either, because Jack's smiles had always been infectious. "Thought you might like it."
"How high up are we?"
"You don't want the answer to that one."
The soldier laughed. "That high, huh."
"Let's just say if I pushed you off the side of this rock, they'd need a spatula to clean up what's left."
"So how are we supposed to get down?"
"The same way we got up here, Jack. Unless you brought a parachute."
"Right, because flannel pants and a t-shirt just scream 'I come prepared for skydiving'."
"You've had stranger things up your ass."
Jack groaned, bringing a hand up to rub at his temples. "I walked right into that one."
"That you did," Gabriel agreed solemnly. "If you feel up to some daredevil stunt work, I could go back down and grab you some gear to get down by yourself."
"Maybe ten, twenty years ago. These days? Not so much." Jack sighed, slumping. Resigned to his fate. "If I haven't worked up to it by the time I want down, you can get ahold of the others, have someone fly up and get me."
Gabriel went dead-silent for a while. "The others are going to have questions," he noted after what had to be at least a half a minute. Maybe longer than that, even.
"Tch. They always have questions. They've been questioning me since I bullied them into letting you back in." Tucking his hands behind his head, Jack laid back against the rock and closed his eyes. "Let 'em talk. I can't be bothered to give a crap anymore. Too tired, too old."
Something in Gabriel's mind had gone very quiet, very still. He mulled over Jack's words, turning them over in his head. A part of him was confused; it sounded so odd to hear such a thing coming from someone like Jack Morrison, literal poster-boy. Unsettling, even. It was the sort of thing that Gabriel might've thought before he'd become the monstrous, inhuman thing that was Reaper. Jack wasn't supposed to say things like that, he was supposed to care about what people thought.
He wasn't supposed to turn into Reyes. But then, Gabriel had been becoming more like the man Morrison had been for a long time, so he couldn't really say anything. If anything, it made things more even.
Gabriel leaned back against the rock, placing his palms flat against it, locking his elbows. He didn't startle when a cool hand sought his, didn't fight it when calloused fingers awkwardly found a way to wind together with his own. He was tired, too-- tired of fighting, tired of hurting, tired of being alone. Tired of the nagging little voice of reason in the back of his mind saying that Jack Morrison couldn't be trusted. Tired of rebelling against something he'd never been able to deny, not even from the start.
He loved that cocky, self-centered, grouchy sonuvvabitch. So, so much. It'd never stopped, and he hated it. Especially so when Jack kept doing things that made him so very worth loving, in spite of everything. Gabriel wanted to hate the man with every fiber of his being. It'd be right to do so. And yet...
And yet.
They'd been through that song and dance before. None of it was worth repeating. None of it had helped, anyway, so what was the point? He hated listening to Jack apologize even more than he hated the fact that he loved the dumb bastard. Partly because he was at least smart enough to know that he was probably the one who should be apologizing half the damn time--
Jack squeezed his hand; he squeezed back, out of some long-forgotten reflex that told him he should. Somehow, it calmed the mess in his head a little. Smoothed out the rough edges on his thoughts, as much as anything ever could.
"Feels like you're running a fever, babe," Jack remarked.
Gabriel snorted. "I always run a little hot these days."
"Huh... Well, it's pretty private up here," the soldier went on to say. "We could, y'know," and the rest of the statement was left to the imagination, aided only by a rather awkward gesture meant to illustrate the point. Gabriel had to grin, forgetting for a moment that it tended to make him look like he had too many teeth.
"We could," he agreed. "Doesn't make it a good idea."
"Since when was anything we did a good idea?"
Jack had a point there.
(Later, as Angela alternated between tending to and chewing out a very sunburnt and bruised Jack, Gabriel decided that he regretted nothing.)