Chapter Text
You miss Reaper by eleven minutes.
How agathokakologically predictable that he works off his frustration by throwing himself into raiding parties instead of sulking somewhere dark and damp like a normal fucking troll. That, at least, keeps everyone well and accounted for.
Or maybe not. Maybe brooding is reserved for your ilk, and Reaper has the right of it by dropping off the face of the ship to go have fun harassing fleet cruisers. It at least saves him from stewing in what has become the oppressive atmosphere of the Talon.
The unspoken agreement that you have all come to is, surprise surprise, that you’re not going to talk about it. Sombra fucked Lynx, decided everything was hunky dory, and because she decided it will become so. She elbows you cheerfully as you grab trays in the omnigrubacquisitionhall, and the affection is so outwardly genuine, you wonder if the mask has gone so deep she’s forgotten why she needs it.
The nights tick by. You need only dodge her for a little longer.
You have avoided this conversation for so many sweeps, convinced that the pieces should fall into play naturally, not to be pushed. So afraid you are, certain one wrong word would undo all you had worked for. Yet, the moment you set your mind to this meeting, you begin to long for its arrival, if only that it will be over. How funny that what we dread changes on a caegar.
For instance, all those other fears seem trite in comparison to what you feel when you burst through the medbay doors and nearly claw Moira to death when you think she’s going to stop you from seeing him.
“How base,” she says as holds your wrist in an iron grasp. “It is truly a shame you’ve grown here, in such uncivilized conditions. If you wish to visit him, you need have only asked.”
Stars you hate her. You want to gnash her throat out right now, but the marks she’s leaving in your frond remind you what a horrible idea that is, and you settle for snarling at her. “Let me through.”
She sighs. But not the long-suffering sigh of an overworked docterror, she has lived here too fleetingly, caused too much fear to be henpecked—no, this is an act, a charming display of playful condescension. She releases your wrist. “Very well. Allow me a moment to stall the dehumidifiers. They’re torture on the gills.”
“Dehumidifiers?” you falter out. You know she’s done something to Reaper. He returned hours ago and only now are you arriving at his recoveryblock, news slow and thin, disjointed with some reports telling you he’s come back in pieces, or not at all.
But Moira presses her fingers against the doorhusk, its legs wiggling in a coordinated shiver of compliance. A black sheet of glass that you did not realize was a window clears, its apparent opaqueness actually the presentence of rolling black smoke amassing on the other side. Moira barely steps out of your way as you charge in.
“Crap,” he hisses as he catches sight of you.
Although, that’s difficult to tell with how many tubes are clinging to his face. Nearly every inch of skin is covered by strange suction cups, the few bare areas burned black and patched with sensory nodes.
No, not burned. As you move closer, you see that his skin is moving, swirling like its gaseous, occasionally sliding to reveal the grey underneath.
“Gaberl, what happened?” You’re almost afraid to move closer. “What is she doing to you?”
“Widow, if you could wait until I’m passed out to start squeezing my shame globes, that’d be just peachy.”
He preempts you. You were, in fact, just about to lay into him for going off on unnecessary escapades, but the scene in front of you now is far mor pressing. You fold your arms. “I’d be happy to, if you’d describe to me the exact details of…this.”
“Jegus,” he groans, but he knows you’re not budging. “Fine. The Doc’s testing out some cell regeneration. Check it.”
With one hand, he scrabbles at a pen on his side table. Then, holding it firm, he stabs it through his other.
“Reaper!” You lunge forward, trying to stop whatever he’s doing, grabbing hold of his injured hand lest he try to impale himself again.
It is inconsequential. The pen sticks out both sides of his palm. As you hold it, his hand in both your own, restrained but supported with all your strength, the squid fluid instrument convulses out of his flesh with a *pop*.
He stares at you, two circles of reflective glass concealing his ganderbulbs that still shine shock. The cycle of confusion-revelation-embarrassment is as clear as though the medical apparatuses were not there at all.
“So, uh. Yeah. I can do that now,” he says, in a failing attempt to continue the conversation while your hands are still locked together.
You don’t have the wherewithal to snatch them away. Instead, they come apart like a pair of magnets, jerking like a claw machine around scalemate. “I…” you say, desperate to explain yourself, the plans of whatever you’d been meaning to confess here tonight falling away.
You are saved, (damned) by the one clown who has made every moment like this an agony.
“Reaper holy fuck!” Sombra says, kicking down the panel of the recoveryblock. “Renvif told me you dragged half an asteroid field into like, fifty hijacks. You have got to fill me in.”
“There were ten,” Reaper says distantly, the barest dash of annoyance returning to his voice, yet another way to remind you how deep in this club you are. “Don’t you know better to listen to Renvif by now?”
“They tell me what I like to hear,” she waves him off. As she crosses to his medicoon, she says with utterly believable nonchalance, “‘sup Amelie.” Like nothing has happened. Like the breaking point is not barreling toward you all. You still feel the ghost of Reaper’s hand within your grasp.
“Some thing has happened,” you insist to unspoken denial.
She freezes. She knows what you meant. “Well obviously,” she chooses to misconstrue, “I doubt he’s horizontal and missing half bodymeat because things all went according to plan.”
“We must talk,” you reiterate.
Reaper stays silent, eyeing you both, positioned on either side of him. A configuration decidedly not the providence you desire.
She blows air to flip her hair out of her face. “Do we really have to do this now?” She glances at Reaper. “Look, everything’s fine. It was a mistake, we regret it, let’s move on eh?”
“It was not-” The words you’d been hoping for won’t come. They don’t fit right in your mouth and the two people you love most are here and Reaper nearly died and you still can’t- “I made you think I bear no feelings, but this is not the case.”
“Okay, I figured, you’re in diamonds or whatever-” (She picks at the edge of her gloves, the hoplelesness spilling out in ways that she always tries not to) “-but not here okay?”
“You idiot.” The voice that speaks up is so sudden, so rare you both jump. “I can’t fucking believe you,” Reaper says. “She’s ashen for us, dumbass.”
You lungs freeze. Sombra looks like she’s been struck, and her gaze flicks to you for confirmation but all you can do gasp like slaughtered fish.
(Haha. Lynx will get a kick out of that.)
“Good one,” she laughs nervously as though desperately still hoping this is a joke. “Nice to see getting the shit kicked out of you to the hoofbeast nebula and back hasn’t wrung it all out of you.”
“You seriously didn’t notice,” he says dully, whether the conversation or the exhaustion getting to him you can’t say. “Come on Sombra, just look at her.”
She does. There are two spotlights shining on you and now, now you should say something, but it feels like you’ve been flayed, every thing you are stripped bare. “I…”
You swallow.
Both of there are watching you, your friends that have put their roots into you and never let you go entirely free, no matter the distance. The people that you have never felt right without. Stilling every particle of your being, you reach forward and take Reaper’s hand in one of your own. The place where he impaled himself meets your thumb.
“I care for you both,” you admit. “I had always hoped that…things would simply be. That we could maintain without me asking for it. But I am done with that. Now I am asking.”
“You…” She looks at Reaper and you. “You really want to auspistice us? I mean…us?”
Finally, a truth that does not hurt to say. “There is nothing I want more.”
Sombra stares for a moment more, as though the concept could ever even begin to cross her mind, and you will not pretend you understand her. You are done predicting what she will do, done thinking you know best. Instead, you offer your other hand, and let her make her own choice.
Almost without warning, she darts to the other side of the bed and takes it. “Sounds like a good deal,” she says, breathless as though crossing an ocean rather than a few meters. “I mean, Minstrels know you and I need it, right Boss?”
“Oh fuck off Sombra,” he scoffs. “A minute ago you didn’t even remember there was fourth quadrant.”
“Of course I did!” she beams confidently. “I was just waiting for one of you to say something.”
Reaper barks something back, but you are too distracted by the warmth in each of your hands. The bickering turns into familiar background noise, like the hum of the ship around you, and it feel so right to allow it to go on. You have each of their bloodpushers, and you squeeze them both.