next round's on me

*

“Sombra? Darlin’, can you…”

It’s Jesse again. She turns her face towards his voice. He’s speaking so softly. His metal-fire hand cradles her cheek.

“...make you comfortable. Just your gloves, boots, and jacket, if that’s alright?”

She presses into his warm touch and nods. Jesse’s distraught-looking face fills her vision when she finally manages to open her eyes.

“Hey there. Okay. I gotcha. I’ll...”

Her body is completely drained. Her mind is sluggish. Jesse’s voice becomes muffled again as she falls asleep.

*

Sombra wakes with a start this time as Hanzo sits bolt upright next to her on the bed. She looks up at him wearily and meets his dark brown eyes. They are so similar to his younger brother’s, but harder, somehow. He stares back at her for a moment, gasping for breath, then gets on his knees and presses his face to the mattress. He’s shaking.

Genji immediately rushes over to him and places a hand on his back. “Hey. You are safe now. This is Sombra and McCree, they helped us.”

Hanzo covers his face with both hands and stays there.

“Sombra?”

She looks up at Jesse, who stands next to the bed, running a hand through his hair. He’s down to his pants and black undershirt. He gives her a relieved little smile and squeezes her shoulder.

“How you feeling?”

Sombra looks back at Genji and Hanzo. Genji has dropped to his knees and now sits on his heels, watching Hanzo collect himself with his head resting on top of his folded arms on the bed. He almost looks like a little boy this way, looking up at his older brother with such wary hope.

“It is over, Hanzo,” he whispers. “The oni is gone.”

Hanzo mirrors Genji and rests his head on his forearms, only he looks over at Sombra instead and fixes her with a dark, heavy stare. “You are not oni. You are something different.”

She nods.

Genji puts a hand on Hanzo’s arm, but Hanzo flinches away from him. The sadness on Genji’s face as he settles back into his kneeling position makes Sombra turn away again, towards Jesse. She feels shaky and out-of-sorts, the way she always does after an exorcism, but the act of destroying a demon soul after allowing it to briefly possess her has left her completely tapped out.

“Darlin’... you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Jesse takes both of Sombra’s hands and pulls her up to stand, but she falters and tilts forward into his chest. “Fine, huh?”

She pushes him backwards, walking them away from the bed and towards her bag by the window. She can feel Hanzo and Genji’s tension behind her.

“Hanzo, you heard what I said. I forgive you. Now is not the time for self-pity. That is how that monster took hold of you.”

“Are you still human?” Hanzo asks, eyeing Genji’s mismatched body parts. Genji is still fully covered in his black hooded clothing, but one of his hands doesn’t quite match the other, and neither do his feet. An odd seam in the side of his neck betrays further patchwork under his clothes. These are the parts Sombra forgot when she first met him, the parts that (through her own error) nearly got Jesse killed.

Sombra can’t believe that was only twenty-four hours ago. She has learned so much that her mind, body, and soul have begun to ache with it.

Genji stands and flexes his newer arm thoughtfully. “I am still alive, despite your efforts, and that is what matters. I have made peace with what I am, with what has happened, and I am stronger for it. The same cannot be said for you.”

Hanzo frowns at Genji’s frank assessment. “How did you survive?”

“My angel could answer that question better than I can. She is a healer, and a witch, like Sombra. She also sent McCree to help us.” Genji tilts his head and deadpans, “She may curse you the moment she lays eyes on you, if you ever meet her, but that is a chance I am willing to take.”

Hanzo scoffs. His mood leaves no room for Genji’s attempt at humor. “And you claim to forgive?”

“I do forgive you, Hanzo. But I do not have to forget. Now, will you come with me and eat? Ichika’s light is still on downstairs. I told her we were going back for you tonight.”

Hanzo shakes his head and scoots back against the headboard, tucking himself cross-legged into the corner of the bed. “I need time to… reflect.”

“Then I will bring it to you. Sombra? McCree?”

Sombra still trembles minutely, though she fights to control it when Jesse wraps his arms around her. Only the feel of her body against him would give him any indication of the extent of her discomfort, and he is certainly paying close attention.

Jesse’s voice rumbles against her cheek. “We’d appreciate it, Genji, thank you. Wouldn’t mind somethin’ heavier than miso, either, if you can get it.” He runs a hand over Sombra’s hair as he makes his request. It makes her feel small in his arms.

She hears the door close behind her as Genji departs for the pub. The moment he does so, Hanzo lets out the deepest sigh she’s ever heard and starts shifting around on the bed.

“Thank you for everything you have done. I do not understand what you did, but I owe you my life.”

“You do,” Sombra replies. Her voice is scratchy, reminiscent of the sounds the demon made through her lips, and it makes her shudder involuntarily. She shuts her mouth and pushes away from Jesse to dig around in her bag.

“You felt it. You know what that creature was, from the inside.”

Sombra ignores him. Her fingers wrap around her oversized black sweater and she pulls it to her chest.

“I saw what you did, just before I... passed out. I saw the way you tricked it. You took such a monstrous thing into yourself to free me from it, and for that, I am in your debt.”

A demon settled and comfortable in its host body will always be stronger than not. A demon inside a new host with clear intent and magic laced through her soul will be an easy kill. It was the smart thing to do. The demon’s imprint now lingers inside her, but all hunts stay for a little while, whether they meet death or banishment at her hands.

Sombra sees their souls and learns their secrets. She learns everything they know, which strengthens her magic. And so, while the vision of Genji’s attempted murder now reverberates through her mind’s eye from Hanzo’s point of view instead of his brother’s, she will simply grin and bear it until the information recedes.

“I’ll let you--” Sombra begins, then quiets again, her cheeky response dying in her throat as she tries to clear it. Her voice still sounds foreign to her own ears, and though she knows it is simply from strain and exhaustion, the demon’s cackle won’t leave her memory. She sees herself hurting Jesse all over again, clawing his face with her gloves, choking him and bruising his throat, turning his face red as he struggles to breathe--

She wrings her sweater in her hands and turns to look at Jesse, to see that he’s okay.

The first thing she sees are the thin, red scratches she left on his cheek. Whatever control she gained over her trembling these past few minutes is lost.

“Sombra, hey. Hey.” Jesse curls his metal-fire hand around her shoulder and guides her into the bathroom, shutting the door behind them.

She lifts a hand to his scratched cheek and presses her palm to his skin. She focuses her energy as well as she can; as her fingers pulse with purple light, the scratches begin to fade.

Jesse pulls her hand away from his face and lifts her chin. “Hey. Talk to me.”

Sombra tries to clear her throat. Almost immediately, a cup of water hovers in front of her face, and Jesse watches her carefully as he waits for her to accept it. It goes down coolly and soothes her throat. She tries again.

“This has happened before,” she says. A sigh of relief follows now that her voice sounds much more familiar to her own ears. “I’ve done that, let demons take me. Let them think they can take me.”

Jesse’s face is cross, even though a foundation of concern lies underneath. He rubs her shoulders, still trying to calm her. “Just playin’ with the idea? Takin’ a test drive? For what?”

“For whatever I need. You saw how I destroyed it. I had to. They fight me, try to take control, but I always win. I always will.”

“What if--”

“Jesse, callate! You trusted me in there. Trust me now.”

He leans against the wall behind him in the small bathroom and runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Sorry. Just… you seem so shook up.”

She nods, releasing the iron grip she still has on her black sweater in her hands to turn it over and shake it out.

“And, uh. It was scary, watchin’ you get taken over like that. I didn’t get to see it, when Gabe did that, but… it was scary.”

“It used me to hurt you,” Sombra whispers, bringing a hand back up to his neck to caress the slight bruising. She’s never done this around anyone who mattered before, anyone whose pain would have hurt her, so she will never forget the look on Jesse’s face. He was as steady as a rock with her clawed gloves around his neck, even smirking, as though the act had been one of her playful taunts. It grounded her.

“That wasn’t the scary part,” he replies, placing his metal-fire hand over the one she’s got gently resting on his collarbone. “I finally saw you, when I said your true name. You. Your eyes are purple?”

“They are. Here, unzip me.” She turns away from him and pushes her hair over her shoulder so that he can unzip her leather bodice and pull off her leggings. Then she turns back to him, bare, and slips her long black sweater over her head.

“Beautiful.” Jesse lets out a small laugh and quirks up the corner of his mouth. “I knew you had an idea of what you were doin’, ya know. I did trust you. But then when I said your true name, I saw the you underneath it all, and it spooked me, ‘cause what if I never saw you again? What if you really did disappear this time?”

Sombra sighs and steps closer to him. “I couldn’t have.”

He opens his mouth to retort with more worries, but Sombra shushes him and kisses his lips. She intertwines her fingers with his metal-fire hand and, lifting up on her toes, places the other around the back of his neck to grasp his hair and pull him in. She still aches, but the discomfort wracking her body ever since she woke up finally calms, just a little, with the sensation of being so close to him.

Jesse reaches down and underneath her thighs without separating from her and lifts her onto the sink. The way he settles between her bare legs as she wraps them around his waist is easy. Inevitable. His grip on her thighs shifts to the small of her back, where he massages her gently, and to the back of her hair, where he presses just enough to tilt her head down and kiss her forehead.

Sombra tucks her face into his neck and exhales into his warm skin. She hadn’t known that this could be the ‘after’ of her more difficult demon encounters. It’s almost overwhelming. She could cry with how good it feels to have him like this after so long enduring alone. She could, but she won’t.

Instead, she finally surrenders and lets him hold her the way they both need tonight, with her weight fully settling against him as she lets him support her.