Work Text:
"I can not believe nerve of that man! He had the audacity to call my turrets obsolete filth! I was a better architech than him before I even joined the Academy!"
"THAT CUNT CALLED ROADHOG A FATTIE I'M GONNA RIP HIS ARMS AND LEGS OFF AND STUFF 'EM UP HIS ARSE!!!"
Torbjorn didn't even bother to look up from his workstation. "Exciting mission?" he asked.
Junkrat flopped down next to him, pulling off his prosthetic arm and throwing it onto his table with a thump. "It was all fucking hard light shit. Doesn't even look cool when it goes boom. Almost wasn't worth the explosions."
"And it wasn't even competent hard light either," Symmetra added. As the proud owner of two fully functional, full length legs, she was responsible for taking the tea supplies out of the safety bunker. "It was some half rate, low level architech barely out of his apprenticeship with more research grants than brain cells."
"Ya could stand to spruce up your turrets some," Junkrat pointed out. "Maybe rig them to explode when they get hit so people can't blow 'em without gettin' blown up?"
At least he had a decent excuse for explosions this time. "EMP blast," Torbjorn said, trying to blindly reattach the wires to Zarya's particle cannon.
"Oi, yeah, fry all their electronics!" Junkrat suggested cheerfully. "They just use pulse shit anyway. No love for finely crafted bombs with real weight to them." He shook his head sadly. "No respect."
"Ah, yes, that is a brilliant idea," Symmetra said. Torbjorn was glad to see she was getting the hang of sarcasm. "Just fry Genji's life support systems while we're at it."
"He's a flanker," Junkrat said. "It's not like he's ever that close to the objective."
"But D.va is," Symmetra pointed out. "Not to mention Lucio. You wouldn't want to damage his healing music, now would you?"
Torbjorn watched out of the corner of his eye as Junkrat went bright red. The color was so vibrant it would have been alarming, had it not been on the face of a young man whose hair constantly smoldered.
"Well fuck you it was Torbjorn's idea anyway," Junkrat said with a pout.
"Ideas aren't worth shit if you don't beat them into concepts," Torbjorn pointed out, "And put yer arm back on before you try to get my tea too."
Junkrat stopped midstride and swiftly latched his arm back on. Symmetra gave him two steaming cups of chai and he set one down on Torbjorn's table.
"The man's comments were completely uncalled for," Symmetra said. "My turrets performed admirably and were crucial in helping us secure the objective. Just because they do not have the power to bludgeon their way through a wall does not mean that all walls ought only be bludgeoned."
"Oi!" Junkrat shouted. "Bludgeoning shit's fun!"
Symmetra scoffed. "But it is hardly the most efficient way to perform one's duties."
"Unless your job is to blow stuff up," Junkrat added.
Torbjorn took a sip of the tea. A touch too spicy for his taste, but strong enough that it didn't really matter. "Was the mission a success?" he asked.
"Of course it was," Symmetra said.
"Then it doesn't matter what the enemy thinks of your work. You did what you were supposed to. They didn't."
"Unless they're also trying to blow stuff up," Junkrat added helpfully.
"They weren't," Symmetra added dryly.
"Well, there you have it then," Torbjorn said before they could start arguing. "No need to worry about anything the enemy said. The only opinions that matter are the opinions of competent people."
~~
Symmetra joined Overwatch not long after one of their earliest missions. She had become disillusioned with Vishkar after finding out that they had a nasty habit of blowing up their competition. She had been welcomed with open arms for about forty seconds until the young idealists realized that she wasn't going to foreswear the idea of law and order.
Torbjorn met her for the first time in the mess hall. Officially, of course, agents could sit wherever they so chose, but everyone knew whose spot was whose. Even with a stranger sitting at his table, Torbjorn wasn't going to walk away and find somewhere else to chow down.
The first thing Symmetra said to him was "You could use a better arm."
Torbjorn raised an eyebrow at her. "Why would I bother? This one does what I need it to."
Symmetra scoffed and returned to her tea, but she was the one who broke the silence a few minutes later. "It's inefficient," she proclaimed.
"Not if you know all it's tricks," Torbjorn replied.
"I meant this base, not your arm," Symmetra clarified. "Nothing gets done in any type of reasonable manner. It's... uncomfortable."
Torbjorn nodded. "Yeah I bet things would be a lot neater in Vishkar."
Symmetra shook her head violently. "Cleaner," she said. "Not neater, not efficient. Wasteful," she spat the word out like poision. A shudder passed through her body and she shook her hands by her ears. "Destroying one corporate building via explosions. Hundreds of death, massive property damage, massive medical bills for surviving population." She spoke quickly, near hyperventilating. "Medical bills, funeral bills, property bills, waste of money, waste of life. Financial strain on workforce leads to emotional strain leads to inefficiency. Control sacrificed for illusion of control. And this is a singular event. Not isolated, oh no, indicative. Indicative of a larger problem."
She downed her tea in hasty gulps. "And you call me cruel for speaking of people like this," she finished, her voice small.
"The young folks might," Torbjorn said. "They all want emotions without any logic underneath. Yeah, cruelty is cruel. But it's also fucking stupid. It's not your fault if stupidity is easier to recognize than that touchy-feely shit my husband's always on about."
Symmetra paused. "Your... husband?" she asked, shocked out of her self pity.
"Yeah, my husband," Torbjorn said. "Reinhardt. Big guy, bigger armor. He gets all that emotional shit. Always went over my head."
"I did not realize you were married," Symmetra said.
Torbjorn grimaced internally. In this day and age, people were a lot more open than they had been in his youth, but Vishkar was that sort of idealized "model efficient" bullshit that probably thought two men kissing would make humans go extinct. "It's not common knowledge," he explained. "During the Crisis, we figured it would be safer if we didn't have a public connection. We didn't want to be liabilities to each other." Lovey dovey romance was all well and good. Look at how it turned out for the Lacroixs.
"You and he do not seem very close."
"When you get to be my get, you start to trust each other not to stray if you stay apart for more than five minutes." Truthfully, as much as he loved Reinhardt and as much as Reinhardt loved him, Torbjorn was a homebody and Reinhardt was an adventurer. Neither saw any need to deny that to each other.
Symmetra nodded, considering.
"You get something on your mind, kid?" Torbjorn asked.
Symmetra blushed faintly, her dark skin going even darker. "Do you think Zarya would, uh, stray with me."
Torbjorn stared. He guffawed so hard that he nearly knocked his coffee clean off the table. "Symmetra, that woman looks at you like you hung the moon and stars."
"But, I didn't?" Symmetra said.
"It means she has the hots for you," Torbjorn clarified. "You should go talk to her. I'm sure she'd love to get to know you better."
Symmetra darted off abruptly, heading towards the gym. Torbjorn didn't smile after her but he didn't kick her out of his workshop either when she turned up two days later three sets of blueprints for prosthetics that lived up to her standards.
~~
If Symmetra needed attention she didn't know how to get, Junkrat had the exact opposite problem.
The gangly junker was loud, brash, and, in McCree's words, as skittish as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He spent most of his time on the outskirts of the base, tailing after Roadhog or blowing something up.
That lasted for a few weeks until a mission came up that needed Roadhog and very definitely did not need Junkrat. Even worse, it was raining heavily enough that he couldn't get a good spark on his bombs. Normally he would hang out with other junior members of Overwatch, but it helped to have someone to hold him back when he got overexcited before the bombs started flying.
Which helped explain why Torbjorn opened the door of his workshop to find Junkrat crouched on top of his weapons cabinet, chin tucked into his peg leg, swatting angrily at Trundlebot with a long stick.
"Hey back off," Torbjorn shouted. Trundlebot approached him with an affronted beep. Trundlebot was the only 'bot Torbjorn could stand. Fitting, given that he had made Trundlebot to stand on and reach shelves that had clearly not been made with him in mind.
"I was just lookin' around, mate," Junkrat grumbled. "No need to get yer panties in a twist."
"If you need a work bench, I'll set one up," Torbjorn said. "If not, get the hell out."
Junkrat thought for a few minutes before he finally slid off the cabinet with all the grace of a goose with a hangover. "Guess I'll see what kinda hardware ya got."
As much as he tried to play it off, he couldn't quite hide his wide eyed glee at the sight of actual tools and spaces to use them. The poor thing had probably never even used a real wrench before. Torbjorn knew a thing or two about improvisation, but at least he'd learned the basics before he had to pull them out of his ass while under fire.
They pass the next few hours with Torbjorn guiding Junkrat through how to hold a screwdriver that won't snap as soon as you try to twist it and Junkrat teaching him a few ways to turn scrap into more scrap that are novel even for Torbjorn.
By the time Roadhog gets back from his mission, Junkrat barely glances up from his rip tire with a mumbled "just a minute". Roadhog gives Torbjorn a thumbs up and wanders off, probably for a little bit of peace and quiet.
~~
The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the courtyard was exploding. Torbjorn sipped a margarita and sat back, leaning his head against Reinhardt's shoulder with Trundlebot's help.
In front of them, Symmetra and Junkrat bickered about the finer details of something or other. Specifically, whether that something or other even needed finer details. It had been a few months since he'd taken the young engineers under his wing and only a few weeks since they'd stopped trying to kill each other at every opportunity.
"And I here I thought you were the one who didn't want children," Reinhardt said with no small degree of amusement.
"I don't need little shits screaming in my ear while I'm working," Torbjorn replied. They'd had the same conversation so many times that any real heat had been worn down to a comforting warmth. Reinhardt was happy with his nieces and nephews and Torbjorn was happy to stay away from them.
In front of them, Junkrat finally got fed up and chucked a grenade into a tree in annoyance, startling Genji from its branches. Symmetra grabbed the grenade with her turrets and threw it off the cliff and sending another Shimada brother skittering away from the scene.
"Explosions aren't the same thing as whining," Torbjorn said before Reinhardt could open his mouth.
Reinhardt chuckled. "Of course, liebling. Of course."