Chapter Text
The thing that would always stick in Jack Morrison’s memory about that last day was how damned ordinary it had been. You’d think the day that Overwatch finally fell should have been dramatic. Lighting in the sky, omens in the clouds, torrential rain or driving snow. Rumbles of thunder to accompany the roar of the guns, perhaps.
But that day dawned slightly overcast and a little chilly. The leaves on the trees that lined Zurich’s streets were just beginning to take on the first tinges of orange, and there was the faintest hint of frost in the air – autumn’s outriders, warning of a bitter winter to follow. Perhaps those had been his omens, he would sometimes think, years later, and he’d been too preoccupied to notice them.
Jack was in the lead vehicle, sat next to the driver, guiding a convoy of three armoured trucks down the Zurich streets with sirens blaring and rush-hour traffic scattering before them. The trucks moved so fast that their anti-gravs couldn’t compensate properly for bumps in the road and his armour clunked and rattled with every pothole. He gripped a handhold in the roof above his head and gritted his teeth to stop himself from biting his tongue.
The trucks came to an intersection and ploughed straight through. Jack caught a glimpse of startled faces through the windows of oncoming cars. He supposed they must be quite a sight: three Overwatch APCs hurtling through the dawn like the devil himself was chasing them.
Or like we’re chasing him, Jack thought.
Watchpoint: Zurich loomed ahead of them, art-deco curves and granite columns. Overwatch’s nerve centre and the pinnacle of everything he and Gabriel had built. Fitting, perhaps, that it was here he’d have to tear half of it down.
“Slow down,” he said to the driver, a man in armour similar to his own. “Don’t want to cause a pile-up.”
The soldier glanced at him, said nothing, didn’t slow. Jack didn’t repeat his request. Privately, he was glad. They needed every second.
One week ago, Jack’s world had been turned upside-down. A massive data leak, worse than any of them had ever planned for: Overwatch’s servers cored open and left for anyone with an internet connection to pick through – which meant just about the entire planet, these days. There had been secrets in there even Jack hadn’t been privy to, things that went deeper than he ever suspected. And from that moment until this one, the word on everyone’s lips had been Blackwatch – Overwatch’s clandestine ops division, headed by ex-Strike-Commander Reyes, once one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world and now out in the light for everyone to see.
Every Blackwatch op, every assassination and bribe and weapons deal, everything Overwatch didn’t stand for. Everything Jack thought it hadn’t stood for.
The leak had been traced within moments, of course. According to Athena, it was hardly a professional job. Almost as if the culprit wanted to be found. And considering the trail had led straight back to Gabriel’s desk, Jack could well believe that.
But the problem was, Gabriel was a hard man to find these days. It went with the territory. For a week the top brass of the UN had bellowed at Jack to find him, to bring him in, to make him face justice. Trying to save face and their own skins, Jack knew, although he kept that thought private. He knew he could very well be in for the chopping block at this rate. They all could. He couldn’t remember a time since the Omnic Crisis when the future had been less certain. Yet, even then, the future had had a modicum of certainty to it. There would be the next mission, and the one after that, and the one after that, until either they won or the omnics did. But this? Jack shuddered and it had nothing to do with the rough ride. Utter uncertainty – he hated it.
“Athena?” he asked, raising a hand to his earpiece and drowning out the growl of the truck’s engine with the other.
“Present, strike-commander.”
“Is Gabriel still there?”
“Commander Reyes remains on-site. He has not moved since you last had me check. Shall I send him a message?” Athena wasn’t supposed to have an emotional range, Jack knew, but he couldn’t help but notice she’d stopped calling him ‘Gabriel’ after the source of the data leak had been revealed.
Jack considered that for a moment. But what would he say? Hi Gabe, mind staying where we can see you for five minutes? Been ordered to bring you in. You know how it goes… He stifled a strained bark of laughter.
“Just inform me if he starts to leave.”
“As you wish, Strike-Commander.”
Jack sat back in his seat, bracing himself as the truck took a corner way too fast, and the anti-gravs spat and crackled as they tried to level the vehicle. For a hair-raising moment, he thought they’d lose control and smash into the buildings either side of them, but the driver was good and kept them from disaster.
They hit the off-ramp with a bone-jarring thud and raced on towards the Watchpoint. The electronics in the trucks talked to the security systems and the gates swung open, barriers raising as they approached. A curve of concrete arced towards the imposing bulk of the Watchpoint and the trucks roared along it like bullets from a gun.
It had been barely half an hour since Gabriel had suddenly reappeared back on Athena’s sensors – and in the middle of their damn headquarters, no less. They’d made good time.
“Why d’you think he came back?” the man driving the truck asked, half to himself and half to Jack.
Jack shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
“Give himself up, maybe?”
“You didn’t know him very well, did you?” Jack said with a sidelong glance at the man. “Gabe’s not the surrendering type.”
“Better than the alternative,” the soldier muttered gloomily. “Thirty seconds,” he added.
Jack hammered on the panel that separated the truck’s cabin from the compartment at the back where six Overwatch soldiers were waiting for their orders. “Thirty seconds!” he yelled, his enhanced voice easily audible over the snarl of the truck’s engine.
“Copy that,” came the response.
The APCs rounded the last curve and veered to a halt outside the Watchpoint. Jack looked up at its gleaming façade as he jumped down from the truck’s cabin and slammed the door shut behind him. The other soldiers clambered out after him, two at a time, their polymer armour clattering on the asphalt. Behind him, the other APCs were ejecting their soldiers too. The faint chill in the air made his knee twinge as they set off towards the sweeping glass doors of the Watchpoint, the memory of an old wound from the Crisis that had never quite healed properly.
“Strike-Commander,” Athena said in his ear as he took the granite steps up to the doors two at a time.
“Go ahead.”
“Commander Reyes is on the move.”
Jack swore. “Heading?”
“Towards the lobby. Perhaps he is coming to meet you?”
Something unpleasant crawled up Jack’s spine. Another bad omen, perhaps.
“Keep tracking him.”
“Affirmative, Strike-Commander.” There was a pause. “And good luck.”
Emotionless AIs weren’t supposed to wish people luck. But then they weren’t supposed to seize control of Omniums and declare war on humanity either. Will we ever learn? he wondered.
His reflection greeted him in the polished glass of the Watchpoint’s doors for a moment, the faded image of a grim-looking man with a rifle, dressed in blue combat armour and with the first few lines of age starting to show around his edges. He pushed it aside and the door swung open at his touch. The soldiers filed in after him, filling the lobby with the pounding of booted feet.
“Fan out, five-meter spread,” he heard one of them say to the rest. You’d think they were quarantining a God Program, the number of soldiers they’d brought. Jack knew the brass thought he had been overreacting to demand three whole squads. His response had simply been that he knew Gabriel better than they did – and so yes, the extra soldiers really were necessary.
Didn’t know him well enough to see this coming, though, a part of him scolded.
The Watchpoint’s lobby was a long sweep of marble that stretched away from Jack in both directions. Glass windows in the walls and roof let in the weak morning sun to cast long shadows over the floor. Along the far wall was the Overwatch memorial – every agent that had fallen in the line of duty, from the earliest days of the Omnic Crisis to the most recent fights against more nebulous threats.
Without meaning to, Jack’s eyes found the small gap in the long, otherwise unbroken list of names and portraits. Once upon a time the name ‘Lena Oxton’ had been inscribed there, until the closest thing to a miracle he’d ever seen had happened.
Directly in front of him was a curving set of stairs that led to the upper floors of the Watchpoint. Two sets of statues flanked it, humanoid figures lined up like they were on a parade ground. The old and the new, they were supposed to represent: Overwatch’s original members passing the torch onto its newest recruits. They’d been designed not to closely resemble anyone in particular, Jack knew, but he couldn’t help but see outlines in their silhouettes. One always made him think of Gabriel, another of poor Ana. On the other side, he’d swear he saw Genji Shimada’s faceplate in the angular lines of one of the statues’ heads. And Lena Oxton’s bulky accelerator in the curves of another.
Would there be an Overwatch left for the new blood to inherit, after what had happened? After what was about to happen? Jack didn’t know. Didn’t want to think about it.
“I always hated those goddamn statues.”
The voice rang out from above them. Several stories up, yet loud enough that Jack could hear it all the way down in the lobby. No baseline human could speak that loud – but the Soldier Enhancement Program had designed its subjects to be able to shout over the loudest battlefield, if comms ever went down.
“Gabriel,” Jack called back. Not a question. Behind him, he heard the soldiers tense.
“Modern art masterpieces. The old making way for the new. Like we’re fucking obsolete.”
Footsteps on the stairs. Jack kept his rifle ready.
“Hey there, Jackie-boy,” Gabriel said as he rounded the curve of the steps and descended towards Jack and the soldiers. He was dressed in Blackwatch colours – black clothes and body armour, his favourite beanie jammed on his head and his favourite shotguns hanging from his belt.
“You know why I’m here,” Jack said as Gabriel reached the last step and stood before him.
“Fat cats and armchair generals got another mission for you? What is it this time – shoot up a bunch of protesters? Bomb a village somewhere?”
“Thought that was more your line of work,” Jack shot back before he could stop himself.
Gabriel looked offended. “Me? I’m not the one who just shoots who he’s told.”
“Just who you want.”
“Ha! Listen to that, boys,” Gabriel scoffed, leaning slightly to address the soldiers assembled behind Jack. “Your Strike-Commander’s got a pair after all.”
“You know," Jack hissed, "I’m your Strike-Commander too.”
“Keep telling yourself that, see where it gets you.” Gabriel chuckled. “Right here, it seems,” he added, gesturing to them, the lobby, the soldiers.
“We’re bringing you in, Gabriel. You can come quietly or not, makes no difference to me.”
“Pro tip, Jack – try not to quote RoboCop when you’re arresting someone.”
Jack ground his teeth. Anger tried to get the better of him. It succeeded.
“Shut up!” he exploded, taking a step forward. Gabriel stood his ground. “You think you can just stand there and crack jokes? After everything you did? I saw the shit you leaked, Gabriel. Murder, extortion, arms deals – and what, you think you’re still the good guy?”
“Listen to yourself, Jackie-boy. Good guy. No one talks like that anymore, you know that, right?”
“Oh, for the love of-”
“I’m the guy they made do the shit you wouldn’t,” Gabriel snarled. “Captain America here doesn’t want to get his hands dirty doing what has to be done, so they fob it off onto his fucking ethnic sidekick who they can afford to bury if things go sideways.” He laughed, humourlessly, despairing, and later Jack would be convinced that it was at that moment that nothing could be saved – the moment that Gabriel decided: fuck it all, let’s do this.
“What do you think this is?” Gabriel continued, pointing to the soldiers who by now had their weapons trained on him. “You’re not here because of what I did, Jack. You’re here because now everyone knows. The brass has decided it’s time to clean house, and they’ve sent their favourite attack dog to do their work. Maybe you’ll get another promotion after this,” he added with loathing.
“Even if that was true, you never had to do what you did! They didn’t point a gun at your head!” Jack bellowed. Gabriel scowled. “And even if they did you were always such a stubborn bastard that I don’t think it’d have made a difference. So why the hell should I believe a word that comes out of your damn mouth?”
“Oh, I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not anymore. You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid so long, you’d believe them if they told you the world was flat. Just know two things, Jack: one, everything I did, I did with authorisation. This goes to the top, Jack, and even then it keeps on fucking going.”
“I’ll be sure to mention that in my report,” Jack deadpanned, injecting as much sarcasm as he could. “And two, before I slap the cuffs on you?”
“And two: I didn’t fight for thirty goddamned years just to rot in a prison cell because I’m no more use to some bean counter. I’m not going down without a fight.”
“You don’t want to do this, Gabriel.”
“Never wanted to do something more in my life, Jackie-boy.” He tensed, ready to grab his shotguns at a moment’s notice. Jack gripped his rifle. “Time to see if you really did learn everything I taught you.”
“There’s one of you. There are twenty of us. Don’t be a damn fool.”
“They’ll write that on your headstone, cabrón.” Gabriel grinned. “Any last words?”
“You’ve got a damn high opinion of yourself.”
“Christ, Jack, even your last words are shit.” Gabriel sighed and shook his head like an exasperated teacher confronted with yet another wrong answer. “You know what? For old time’s sake, I’m going to give you one last piece of advice, Jackie-boy.”
“What?” Jack growled.
“Get down.”
It took Jack half a second to process those words and the meaning behind them, another half-second to believe them. Plenty of time for Gabriel’s hand to shoot to his belt, retrieve something that looked horribly like a detonator, jam his thumb down on it…
The explosion erupted behind Jack, picked him up and sent him flying like an angry child throwing a doll. He felt it in his chest as much as he heard it in his ears, a heavy smack that made his lungs ache. The world span crazily. His vision blurred. Something rushed up to meet him and he crashed into it with a spasm of pain. For a moment his vision darkened around the edges.
Coughing and gasping, fighting off unconsciousness, Jack picked himself up from the floor with bleeding hands. He looked up. The explosion had knocked him into one of the statues and there was a nasty crack in it where the cheap plaster had come off second-best. He gulped down a mouthful of air and started choking as his lungs filled with smoke. His ears rang with the echo of the explosion and the sound of screams.
Athena in his ear: “Strike-Commander? Strike-Commander! I’ve lost visual contact with the Watchpoint lobby! Seismic sensors are pulsing! What’s going on?”
Jack heaved for breath and leant against one of the statues. Thick, black smoke swirled lazily in the air. Faint shapes moved through it, indistinct, fleeting. There came the chatter of automatic fire and the truncated scream of someone being cut down.
To his left, the air suddenly shimmered, distorted, and there was a man stood there where there hadn’t been one a second ago. He wore black combat armour and a balaclava covered his face.
Thermoptic camo, his punch-drunk mind told him. Blackwatch. Ambush. Shit!
Completely on instinct, Jack raised his rifle and raked the man with a burst of machine gun fire. He went down in a spray of red spatters and white chunks, bright blue armour-gel leaking out of his shattered chestplate.
From somewhere above him, Gabriel’s voice boomed like the voice of God. “Ladies and gentlemen of Blackwatch!” Jack looked around wildly but all he could see was the smoke, the dust, bodies in Overwatch armour sprawled across the floor.
“We fought in the shadows for years!” Gabriel continued. “We bled so that the rest of Overwatch could keep their squeaky-clean reputation! Our comrades died to put stripes on Morrison’s shoulders! And this is how they repay us?”
Some smoke ebbed aside, curling slowly through the air of the lobby, and Jack was afforded a clear view upwards. Gabriel was stood at the top of the stairs, leaning over the balcony and bellowing down at the fighting Overwatch and Blackwatch soldiers like a mad priest haranguing his congregation.
“The moment we’re not useful, we’re to be swept aside!" Gabriel roared. "Is that the fate you want?”
“No!” Jack heard some of the Blackwatch soldiers cry back.
“Are we going to go quietly?”
“No!”
“Are we going to give them something to goddamn remember us by?” Gabriel was grinning now, a mad and twisted leer, spittle flying from his lips.
“Hell yeah!” came a voice from the other side of the statue Jack was propped up against. He whirled around. The empty air rippled as a Blackwatch commando de-cloaked and leapt at him, shoving a pistol into his face. Jack caught it and shoved it aside just as she pulled the trigger. The bullet snapped past him and raised a puff of pulverised masonry next to his head. She snarled wordlessly at him and tried to aim again, but he was stronger, had been designed by a lot of government scientists to be stronger. He ripped the gun out of her hand with the crackle of dislocating wrist bones and, in blind survival mode, used it as a club to crush her skull. The Blackwatch soldier went down with a faint gurgle and didn’t move.
Jack tossed the pistol aside, picked up his rifle, fired at another commando who was pouring suppressing fire towards a group of Overwatch soldiers cowering behind the memorial wall.
“The way I see it, we’re all dead men walking!” Gabriel hollered from above. Jesus, he’s gone over the edge, Jack thought madly to himself as he pressed himself to the floor to avoid return fire. “So if we’re going down, we’re taking them with us!”
Bullets pinged and whined all around him. Jack sprinted out of cover, trying to draw fire, reasoning it was probably him Blackwatch was after more than the soldiers he’d brought with him. He dived behind the memorial wall just as something high-calibre chewed new holes into the marble, erasing the names of a few more agents.
“Blackwatch!” Gabriel shouted from above, pumping his fist into the air.
“Blackwatch! Blackwatch!” came the roar of the reply.
“All units, all units, sound off,” Jack gasped into his own microphone.
Dead silence in his ear.
“Alpha squad, report.” Nothing. “Delta squad? Zulu squad?” Shit, shit, shit. “Is anyone still alive in here?”
A few faint crackles, like tattered remnants trying to speak through damaged – or jammed? – comms. Nothing he could count on. The few barks of gunfire still suggested that someone was still alive out there, but where and how many? He had no idea.
Suddenly his earpiece fizzed and cracked. “Strike-Commander?”
“Athena?” he gasped.
“Heavy interference throughout the Watchpoint, Strike-Commander. Communications are down and my subsystems have received substantial damage. Something is going on!”
“It’s Gabriel. He’s… staging a mutiny,” Jack said, aware of how ridiculous that sounded. “Blackwatch has ambushed us, multiple casualties. Athena, you need to get us some support now!”
A moment’s pause on the other end of the connection. A long time, by the standards of AI.
“No additional units are available, Strike-Commander.”
Something not a million miles from panic slithered down Jack’s spine and coiled up in his guts.
“What?” he demanded. “But there’s a whole reserve battalion at Watchpoint: Geneva…”
Athena cut him off, with an odd, clipped tone that Jack had never heard her use before.
“Incoming call, Strike-Commander. From Senator Petras.”
“Now is not the time!” Jack spat.
“Connecting,” Athena said simply, as if she hadn’t heard – or didn’t have a choice, Jack realised.
“Morrison?” came a new voice in his ear. Senator Petras, Overwatch liaison to the UN Security Council. Not a man Morrison got along with and not the man he wanted to be speaking to now. “Athena tells me there’s a situation brewing down there.”
Jack peered around the corner of the memorial, checking no-one was advancing on his position. He caught one Blackwatch soldier between cover and blew the man’s knee out for his trouble.
“Reyes is resisting arrest,” he said as he ducked back to avoid the bullets. “Blackwatch is aiding him. All support squads down, I need reinforcements!” He was supposed to tack a ‘sir’ onto the end of that, but he really wasn’t feeling too deferential right now.
“I see. Can you contain him?”
“I’ll be lucky if I get out of here alive!” Jack said. “You need to contact Geneva! Get the reserves up here now!”
“That’s a ‘no’, then?”
“What?” Jack asked, shaking his head as if the senator could see him.
“Very well.” Petras sighed heavily. “In that case, Strike-Commander, your service will be honoured. Petras, out.”
And with that the line went dead.
Jack was left crouching behind the battered memorial wall, immobilised by a mixture of shock and horror. “Athena?” he asked desperately. “Athena?”
Your service will be honoured. There was only one thing that could mean.
Booted feet sounded behind him. He turned to see Gabriel striding out of the smoke, shotguns levelled at his head.
In his ear, Athena suddenly cried: “Strike-Commander! I’m detecting a missile launch!”
The bottom dropped out of Jack’s stomach. No…
“Launch detected from Hardpoint: Mont Blanc. Ballistic missile, sub-continental range. Target unconfirmed. On trajectory for Zurich.” Athena’s voice was clipped and cold as she read out his death sentence – and then quavered a little as she added: “I apologise, Strike-Commander. They used my override codes. There was nothing I could do.”
The world suddenly seemed to go very quiet, despite the gunfire rattling away behind Jack, Gabriel’s footsteps echoing around him, the first creaks and groans of the Watchpoint’s superstructure buckling under the damage Gabriel’s bomb had caused.
“It’s okay, Athena,” he lied. “It’ll be okay.”
“…Strike-Commander?” Athena asked. Something in her voice sounded plaintive, afraid. “Blast radius of the missile is approximately half a mile. If you hurry…”
“Don’t worry, Athena. I’ll make it.” A lie, they both knew it, but a necessary one.
A pause. “Understood.”
“Take care, Athena.”
He cut the connection before she could say anything else. And that just left him and Gabriel.
“End of the line, cabrón,” Gabriel chuckled as he stepped up to Jack, broken masonry and glass crunching underfoot.
“Gabriel, listen to me,” Jack started.
“Bit late for that.”
“Listen to me!”
“Listen to you, what? Beg?”
“Gabriel, for God’s sake, they’ve launched a damn missile at us! We have to get out of here!”
Gabriel just laughed, and then he took a second look at Jack’s face. Whatever had come between them, they’d known each other for the better part of thirty years now – and they knew when the other was lying.
“You’re serious,” Gabriel said after a moment.
“We have to get out of here,” Jack said. “This is bigger than your petty revenge play. Call your men off, we need to get out of here now.”
Together, as if on some mutually shared instinct, they looked up through the smoke and the shattered glass of the Watchpoint. The morning sky shone crisp and blue above them, peppered with a few flecks of white cloud.
And there in the middle of it all, a thin streak of grey, capped by a glimmering speck. Seeming almost to hang in the sky, not moving higher or lower, the odd optical effect of looking directly down the axis of motion.
Incoming.
“Jesus Christ,” Gabriel muttered under his breath.
“We still have time…” Jack croaked.
“We never had time,” Gabriel said. “Those things don’t fly that fast.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked, knowing exactly what he meant but refusing to believe it.
A strong hand suddenly grabbed Jack’s wrist, his feet were kicked out from under him. The world span and he toppled to the floor with a cry.
“What do you think I fucking mean?” Gabriel demanded, pinning Jack to the floor. “They launched that thing before you even turned up here.”
“Gabriel, for God’s sake!”
“How does it feel, huh, Jackie-boy? To know you’re just as disposable as I am?”
Jack writhed, tried to kick Gabriel off, got a knee in his back for the trouble.
“Incoming missile strike! Everybody out, now!” Gabriel roared across to where the Blackwatch commandos were finishing off the last of the Overwatch soldiers. There were a few seconds of confused silence,
“You deaf or something? Everybody out!”
Jack heard the clatter and scramble of the Blackwatch soldiers clearing out as fast as their legs could carry them. Probably their own AIs were warning them too, and they’d been as reluctant to believe as he had. He struggled against Gabriel’s grip again tried to throw him off, got nowhere. Gabriel always had been the better one at hand-to-hand combat.
Jack twisted his head, looked up again. That speck hadn’t moved but it had grown bigger. If he strained his ears he thought he could hear the screech of its engine, powering down towards the Watchpoint like some latter-day bird of prey.
“You ever died for something you believed in?” Gabriel asked, gazing up at the plummeting warhead with a mad grin on his face. “I have. So many times I’ve lost count, Jack. At least this time, I know they won’t be able to use me anymore.”
And Jack opened his mouth to reply, although what he would say he never could remember. But before he could even draw breath, the world was suddenly drowned out. All he could see was light, bright and furious and burning. His ears were battered by the roar of detonation and the shriek of collapsing metal and splintering glass. Something razor-sharp whirled across his face but he felt nothing at all. Because all he could feel was a horrible, scorching heat – which was suddenly replaced with crushing pressure as, in one last, desperate act, Gabriel flung himself down and shielded Jack’s body with his own.