Her tone was mild, but something under it said don't argue with me. Whatever it was they needed to get out between them, Ana would not be ready for it until she had a hot drink cupped in her hands. She'd talked Jack down enough times over the years that she knew she needed all the sustenance she could get.
The water finally boiled, the kettle letting out a long, forlorn whistle. She flicked off the gas and poured the tea. Steam rose from the cups, the chilly air coaxing it into long curling wisps.
She set one mug in front of Jack, then took a seat across him with the other.
He started to protest, the first syllable already on his lips as she spoke. He knew that tone a little too well. Even as stubborn as he was, he knew well enough to wait. It gave him a chance to gather his thoughts further. Chase them around. Debate himself. As she worked with the tea, he worked on shedding more of his gear. The vials strapped to his arm, armor under his jacket, items from his belt. By the time she brought the tea it was laid out across half the small table, ready to be inspected.
Muttering his thanks, he wrapped his hands around the mug. He wasn't much of a tea person, but even he had to admit the warmth felt good. Sometimes, small comforts mattered even to a calloused husk like him.
"Rumors," he repeated. "High profile targets turning up dead. Sightings of a black cloud. Sounds worth checking out." It was Los Angeles, though. That was hardly enough to go on. But he'd rather chase ghosts than answer the call.
Ana did not reply immediately. She took a sip of her tea. The tannin in it was a hint of bitterness against her tongue.
"Los Angeles is an eighteen-hour flight away." Her voice was carefully neutral. She fixed him with a stare from her good eye. "And I've heard the rumours too. We've been hearing them for months. Why are they suddenly so important?"
Gaze lowering to the mug in his hands, he didn't answer right away. There wasn't anything in Los Angeles. He'd been tracking those rumors, and they were little more than wisps. Unrelated events, corrupted through various channels of communication, degraded and warped. It wasn't the location, but the distance.
"Better than staying put," he offered. The did need to relocate soon. That much was true.
Maybe only to her, Ana thought. But they had lived through the years before the fall of Overwatch together, so perhaps that was why she saw it. All the time he'd spent taking the fall, hounded by reporters and ambassadors, by activists and presidents. She'd been at his right hand through each grueling meeting and painful press conference, until she'd run from it all.
Another thing they had in common.
"There are other places we could go," she offered. Pointedly. Then, tired of the ever-growing elephant in the room: "You saw the message too."
It hadn't seemed so difficult back then. Taking that burden had been necessary to allow his team to operate. He may have shouldered the burden himself, but he had support. He had Ana, and Reyes, and all that he believed in about doing the right thing. About protecting people. When they thought Ana had died, it had been a devastating blow, but they managed to recover. But then came the double hit of his beliefs being ripped out from under him by his superiors and what Reyes did...he'd collapsed under the weight. If Ana had been there for the London events, maybe it wouldn't have hit so hard. Maybe.
To the untrained eye, he seemed to grow more serious at her words. But to someone like her, who knew him a little too well, the truth was all too obvious. The sternness of his face wasn't contemplation, but a grinding of teeth. He wasn't just holding the mug, he was clutching it. Hard. A faint tremor seemed to have found his way into his fingers. He'd resolved to be firm. To reject it outright. That wasn't where he belonged anymore. And still, he found the worst sticking in his throat.
"I...can't." There was a fierceness to his voice, but it wasn't from his old conviction. There was no fire in his eyes as he said it.
Ana watched him, her own fingers curled around the handle of her mug. To an untrained observer she was infinitely more relaxed than he, but the cant of her head and the slight narrowing of her eye betrayed her alertness.
"Tell me why."
Too often Jack left things unsaid, bottled them up until they spilled over in unintended ways. Perhaps a leftover from the old days when he'd had to keep himself carefully in check, the commander perfectly groomed for the public eye. But if anyone could coax him into talking, it was her. After everything...they owed each other no less than full honesty.
For too long, he didn't move. He sat, watching the steam curl up from his mug. Too long to be merely gathering his thoughts in order to respond. This was not something he could speak so freely. It was one thing to go over it himself, but speaking it, even to Ana, made it seem suddenly too heavy to bear. He'd been prepared to make his stance, to argue against going back. But the way she asked why, his prepared reasons would not suffice.
"Because I can't, Ana." He wasn't just repeating himself. He took a slow breath and pushed on. "After all that happened, after all that I didn't do, after so many people died because..." the strength left his voice suddenly and he set his mug down. "...I was too blind to see it, all of it, coming." It wasn't just about what Reyes had done, but that was certainly a bulk of it. He couldn't face the oversight, the answering to governments, the waiting for approval, the sheer weight of decisions of the magnitude. At least now he didn't need to explain his actions to anyone, and he wasn't getting anyone else hurt. At least not anyone he cared about.
She listened silently, giving him the space to finish. Even after he trailed off she took her time in answering, letting the tea warm her.
"I can't say we were always in agreement, toward the end. But I don't know if you -- if we -- could have done any more, Jack." Overwatch by then had grown into a bloated, overburdened organization, slowly and surely strangled by its own bureaucratic processes and conflicting alliances. She understood. She had run from it too, after all.
"You take too much on your shoulders."
He'd been the face of Overwatch, the hero. At times she'd looked at him and seen selfless responsibility; at other times, a hubris that she saw too often in powerful men who thought they were the center of the universe. Atlas with his endless burden.
"Even now. Who's to say that this new Overwatch won't be completely different? We couldn't return to being who we once were, even if we wanted to."
And here I thought my fake-out image scared you off XD
Seconds passed as he stared at the tea slowly cooling between his hands. She wouldn't understand, not completely. He doubted there was anyone who would. This wasn't just coming to terms with the past. In time, perhaps he could do that. But trying to go back to the way it once was, that was impossible. Whatever he'd been able call upon in days past to get him through everything, that part of him was as dead as his friendship with Reyes. Something he'd thought once unbreakable, now shattered to dust.
Finally, he gave a slight shake of his head. "I could have ignored protocol. I could have ordered an operation without authorization."
Slowly, he let go of the mug, lacing his fingers together and pressing them against his chin. His face remained an impassive mask, but that single gesture spoke of how much he was just trying to hold himself together. This was supposed to just be a firm refusal to not go. So why didn't he just put his foot down?
"It's not about returning to who I used to be. I'm..." there was a strange waver to his voice, before he swallowed, and pushed on, his voice not quite as steady it had been. "I'm just not strong enough for it. Any of it."
She almost snorts. She called him dramatic earlier, and she was right. But she schools her expression into one of calm patience. Sometimes, prickly as he is, he needs a soft touch.
"Look at it this way. The UN hasn't touched the Petras Act for a decade. We'd be two illegal vigilantes joining an already illegal organization. There's not much further to fall."
Ana herself has devoted no few hours of thought to the issue. She's gotten used to it being just her and Jack, vigilantes on the run. But there's a limit to how much two people can do. And if Winston and Tracer are at the core of this revival, the new Overwatch is already hampered by an overabundance of idealism. As pessimistic as Jack is nowadays, the cynical pragmatism which the two of them could bring is sorely needed.
It's cool, I'm in the middle of midterms myself so I feel it
His hands tightened, fingers squeezing together and pressing harder against his upper lip. How could he get his point across? It wasn't something he'd devoted much time to putting words to, even after all these years. It was a nameless aversion, a driving force away from not just Overwatch as an organization, but the people within it. All of them, not just the likes of Reyes, for various reasons.
The only one he hadn't felt that with was Ana herself. Perhaps it was their long history, the fact that they shared such a similar situation. She was a ghost and he was a shadow. But it was more than that. It was how they operated. They weren't a traditional team, rather two people who happened to have similar goals. Neither was the leader. They didn't fight side by side, their methods putting them on different levels, literally and metaphorically. Some how all of that allowed it to slip passed whatever kept him from even considered a return.
"It's not just the oversight," he said, moving to fold his arms over his chest. He started to say something else, but he stopped and shook his head, letting out a hard breath. He knew the shape of what he wanted to tell her, but he'd spent so long pushing it down and ignoring it, he just couldn't find a way to explain it. "When you were injured, why didn't you tell us you were alive?" He already knew the answer, but he couldn't think of another way.
[ I swear every time I tag you Pandora plays "Never Going Back" by The Score and it's so fitting ]
It was a non sequitur, but she thought she saw where he was going with it. After a moment she answered.
"I felt that I had failed you all." Her smile was a little sad. "I did not want to have to face that failure. It was cowardice."
She said it with a brutal, precise honesty, without flinching. She'd had years to reflect on that decision, and lately it had been on her mind more than ever. Overwatch, all the comrades she'd left behind; and Fareeha, who was perhaps the person she had wronged most of all.
He started to nod, his gaze finally lifting, hoping somehow to impress upon her what he was getting at without having to say it. She had to understand, she'd been there. But just as they had drastically different views of any given battlefield, they both looked at this situation very differently. Just with battle, she knew exactly where to strike for the most damage.
One word was all it took. His chin dipped down again as he twisted his face away from her. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. Yell about the cowards who forced him to stay back. Shout about how much of a coward Reyes had been for acting the way he had. But it would have all been a lie, or at least a means of avoiding the truth. That anger, that conflict, flashed across his weathered features. He could admit to his failure, he'd freely admit that. But to call himself a coward?
"It's not like that," he said, his eyes closed. "Not for me."
He hadn't walked away. He was still sitting there with her. That was some sort of progress, at least.
What he needs, she thought suddenly, is a therapist, and the incongruous image of Jack seated in some sterile office next to a houseplant, sweating in terror as he tried to express his emotions, was almost enough to make her laugh out loud. But it was out of the question. All he had was her. Perhaps when she was younger, hotheaded, she would have resented that. Resented him for it. But by now she'd resigned herself to the fact.
"How is it for you, then?" She pitched her voice soft, almost kindly, but there was an edge of steel under it sharpened by old knowledge.
His fingers closed into a tight fist, his lips pressed into a tight line. She was supposed to understand, damn it. Why couldn't she just accept it. But he already knew why. Because she knew him. She knew he was stubborn as stone, difficult to budge, difficult to open up, but prone to cracking. And he doubted she'd allow him to keep running away from this one.
"My failure, my..." he hesitated, lips pressing together again before saying the word, "cowardice wasn't with everything thinking me dead. It was before that. My failure was holding them back when I knew it was wrong. Without me, they'll be better than before. It's..." then all of that tension, all of that stubbornness seemed to bleed out of him, his shoulders sagging. "...just better this way."
There was genuine sympathy in her voice now. She knew the shape of what he was saying. Knew it all too well. She'd faced it herself.
"When will you allow yourself to let go of the past?"
Her mistakes had been as brutal as his. She had run before Overwatch's death throes even took hold, left behind loved ones and a child. But she felt ready to atone. Call it the wisdom of a woman who knew when to bend without breaking. Jack -- Jack never learned that particular trick.
Bending had always been Reyes' forte, or so he'd thought. That's why he'd been so suited to Blackwatch, able to bend where others could not. And that was where Jack saw his greatest failure. As if to make up for it, he'd made himself harder than ever before. Before the fall, he'd been an oak tree. Solid, but still able to move with the breeze. But now he was iron. Solid and unyielding.
"When I correct my mistake," he said at last, still sounding defeated. On that day, he'd had a chance to stop Reyes. Yet he'd hesitated. "If I can stop Reyes, then there's a chance..." that he could what? Forgive himself? That wasn't likely. But maybe he could start moving on. Talking about the past, about this, was far easier than talking about moving forward, or trying again.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
"Tea first."
Her tone was mild, but something under it said don't argue with me. Whatever it was they needed to get out between them, Ana would not be ready for it until she had a hot drink cupped in her hands. She'd talked Jack down enough times over the years that she knew she needed all the sustenance she could get.
The water finally boiled, the kettle letting out a long, forlorn whistle. She flicked off the gas and poured the tea. Steam rose from the cups, the chilly air coaxing it into long curling wisps.
She set one mug in front of Jack, then took a seat across him with the other.
"So. Talk to me. Los Angeles."
no subject
Muttering his thanks, he wrapped his hands around the mug. He wasn't much of a tea person, but even he had to admit the warmth felt good. Sometimes, small comforts mattered even to a calloused husk like him.
"Rumors," he repeated. "High profile targets turning up dead. Sightings of a black cloud. Sounds worth checking out." It was Los Angeles, though. That was hardly enough to go on. But he'd rather chase ghosts than answer the call.
a calloused husk LMFAO
"Los Angeles is an eighteen-hour flight away." Her voice was carefully neutral. She fixed him with a stare from her good eye. "And I've heard the rumours too. We've been hearing them for months. Why are they suddenly so important?"
he thinks very highly of himself, you see
"Better than staying put," he offered. The did need to relocate soon. That much was true.
no subject
Maybe only to her, Ana thought. But they had lived through the years before the fall of Overwatch together, so perhaps that was why she saw it. All the time he'd spent taking the fall, hounded by reporters and ambassadors, by activists and presidents. She'd been at his right hand through each grueling meeting and painful press conference, until she'd run from it all.
Another thing they had in common.
"There are other places we could go," she offered. Pointedly. Then, tired of the ever-growing elephant in the room: "You saw the message too."
no subject
To the untrained eye, he seemed to grow more serious at her words. But to someone like her, who knew him a little too well, the truth was all too obvious. The sternness of his face wasn't contemplation, but a grinding of teeth. He wasn't just holding the mug, he was clutching it. Hard. A faint tremor seemed to have found his way into his fingers. He'd resolved to be firm. To reject it outright. That wasn't where he belonged anymore. And still, he found the worst sticking in his throat.
"I...can't." There was a fierceness to his voice, but it wasn't from his old conviction. There was no fire in his eyes as he said it.
no subject
"Tell me why."
Too often Jack left things unsaid, bottled them up until they spilled over in unintended ways. Perhaps a leftover from the old days when he'd had to keep himself carefully in check, the commander perfectly groomed for the public eye. But if anyone could coax him into talking, it was her. After everything...they owed each other no less than full honesty.
no subject
"Because I can't, Ana." He wasn't just repeating himself. He took a slow breath and pushed on. "After all that happened, after all that I didn't do, after so many people died because..." the strength left his voice suddenly and he set his mug down. "...I was too blind to see it, all of it, coming." It wasn't just about what Reyes had done, but that was certainly a bulk of it. He couldn't face the oversight, the answering to governments, the waiting for approval, the sheer weight of decisions of the magnitude. At least now he didn't need to explain his actions to anyone, and he wasn't getting anyone else hurt. At least not anyone he cared about.
sorry for the slow tag, i spaced out on it!
"I can't say we were always in agreement, toward the end. But I don't know if you -- if we -- could have done any more, Jack." Overwatch by then had grown into a bloated, overburdened organization, slowly and surely strangled by its own bureaucratic processes and conflicting alliances. She understood. She had run from it too, after all.
"You take too much on your shoulders."
He'd been the face of Overwatch, the hero. At times she'd looked at him and seen selfless responsibility; at other times, a hubris that she saw too often in powerful men who thought they were the center of the universe. Atlas with his endless burden.
"Even now. Who's to say that this new Overwatch won't be completely different? We couldn't return to being who we once were, even if we wanted to."
And here I thought my fake-out image scared you off XD
Finally, he gave a slight shake of his head. "I could have ignored protocol. I could have ordered an operation without authorization."
Slowly, he let go of the mug, lacing his fingers together and pressing them against his chin. His face remained an impassive mask, but that single gesture spoke of how much he was just trying to hold himself together. This was supposed to just be a firm refusal to not go. So why didn't he just put his foot down?
"It's not about returning to who I used to be. I'm..." there was a strange waver to his voice, before he swallowed, and pushed on, his voice not quite as steady it had been. "I'm just not strong enough for it. Any of it."
no i'm just rly scattered rn :P
"Look at it this way. The UN hasn't touched the Petras Act for a decade. We'd be two illegal vigilantes joining an already illegal organization. There's not much further to fall."
Ana herself has devoted no few hours of thought to the issue. She's gotten used to it being just her and Jack, vigilantes on the run. But there's a limit to how much two people can do. And if Winston and Tracer are at the core of this revival, the new Overwatch is already hampered by an overabundance of idealism. As pessimistic as Jack is nowadays, the cynical pragmatism which the two of them could bring is sorely needed.
It's cool, I'm in the middle of midterms myself so I feel it
The only one he hadn't felt that with was Ana herself. Perhaps it was their long history, the fact that they shared such a similar situation. She was a ghost and he was a shadow. But it was more than that. It was how they operated. They weren't a traditional team, rather two people who happened to have similar goals. Neither was the leader. They didn't fight side by side, their methods putting them on different levels, literally and metaphorically. Some how all of that allowed it to slip passed whatever kept him from even considered a return.
"It's not just the oversight," he said, moving to fold his arms over his chest. He started to say something else, but he stopped and shook his head, letting out a hard breath. He knew the shape of what he wanted to tell her, but he'd spent so long pushing it down and ignoring it, he just couldn't find a way to explain it. "When you were injured, why didn't you tell us you were alive?" He already knew the answer, but he couldn't think of another way.
[ I swear every time I tag you Pandora plays "Never Going Back" by The Score and it's so fitting ]
i'll have to check that out!
"I felt that I had failed you all." Her smile was a little sad. "I did not want to have to face that failure. It was cowardice."
She said it with a brutal, precise honesty, without flinching. She'd had years to reflect on that decision, and lately it had been on her mind more than ever. Overwatch, all the comrades she'd left behind; and Fareeha, who was perhaps the person she had wronged most of all.
no subject
One word was all it took. His chin dipped down again as he twisted his face away from her. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. Yell about the cowards who forced him to stay back. Shout about how much of a coward Reyes had been for acting the way he had. But it would have all been a lie, or at least a means of avoiding the truth. That anger, that conflict, flashed across his weathered features. He could admit to his failure, he'd freely admit that. But to call himself a coward?
"It's not like that," he said, his eyes closed. "Not for me."
He hadn't walked away. He was still sitting there with her. That was some sort of progress, at least.
no subject
"How is it for you, then?" She pitched her voice soft, almost kindly, but there was an edge of steel under it sharpened by old knowledge.
no subject
"My failure, my..." he hesitated, lips pressing together again before saying the word, "cowardice wasn't with everything thinking me dead. It was before that. My failure was holding them back when I knew it was wrong. Without me, they'll be better than before. It's..." then all of that tension, all of that stubbornness seemed to bleed out of him, his shoulders sagging. "...just better this way."
no subject
There was genuine sympathy in her voice now. She knew the shape of what he was saying. Knew it all too well. She'd faced it herself.
"When will you allow yourself to let go of the past?"
Her mistakes had been as brutal as his. She had run before Overwatch's death throes even took hold, left behind loved ones and a child. But she felt ready to atone. Call it the wisdom of a woman who knew when to bend without breaking. Jack -- Jack never learned that particular trick.
no subject
"When I correct my mistake," he said at last, still sounding defeated. On that day, he'd had a chance to stop Reyes. Yet he'd hesitated. "If I can stop Reyes, then there's a chance..." that he could what? Forgive himself? That wasn't likely. But maybe he could start moving on. Talking about the past, about this, was far easier than talking about moving forward, or trying again.