#mercykill week

They never found Jack’s body, but he got a gravestone.

They found Gabriel’s, though. Half alive, barely breathing, broken beyond belief.

She found Gabriel’s. She was looking for it. For him. She could barely remember screaming for him. She knew she has been but the sound of destruction and possible death was deafening.

She tried to fix him. She tried.

She knew what sort of chemicals had enhanced him. Kept him from aging as fast, sped up the healing process in his body, enhanced his strength. She knew him. Intimately.

How else does a woman know her husband, after all?

Fear and anxiety, rage, pain, andrenaline all rushed through her as she altered the biological and chemical makeup the serum that had created him—enhanced it—and pumped it straight into his body, hoping to enhance his healing functions.

She’ll never forget his screams as his body morphed and changed, his skin grew pale, dead looking, and then, as if in her worst nightmare, he seemed to just...evaporate in a cloud of black smoke. Gone. Dead.

Jack had a tombstone. She’d had to fight to get Gabriel one.

And now, the anniversary of his death—of her biggest personal and professional mistake—was upon her.

She hated remembering. She hated that, no matter where she was in the world, she visited that gravestone every year.

And every year: “I’m so sorry.” As she laid flowers on his grave. Her wedding ring hung around her neck now, tucked away.

This year was no different. She entered the graveyard, a small one, very remote, in the Los Angeles foothills. No one but she and a few others knew where she had put the empty grave. She carried white roses, and her ring was dangling in the open tonight as she fixed her scarf and knelt in front of the stone.

Tears filled her eyes as she touched the name on the writing. A moment of weakness few else ever saw anymore, if at all. “I’m so sorry. I never meant this for you.”

It was silent for a moment, and then she felt the air grow colder and she looked up. Familiar dark smoke appeared in front of her and then a creature in black with an ominous skull mask stood behind the grave, a large shotgun pointed at her where she knelt.

She didn’t know how, but she could tell how focused the monster was on her, and her eyes widened. This was him; the Reaper who had been hunting them down.

“So, you’ve come for me, then...” This was the first time she’d ever seen him. She had half a mind to reach for her pistol, tucked away in a holster under her coat. But then she looked at Gabriel’s name again and bowed her head. “Go on, then.”

“Just now. What did you say to him?”

When she lifted her head again, his masked face was in her bubble, and she jerked away a little, brows furrowing. “I...I said I never meant this for him.”

There was a dark, growling chuckle, and he lifted the ring around her neck with the end of his gun, examining it. He chuckled again and stood, his voice dropping low and menacing. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”

Her head whipped up again to look at him, and she noticed the gleam of something falling out from beneath his robes, hanging around his neck. Her eyes widened to the size of saucers. “Gabriel?”

She jumped up, lunged to touch him, catch him, even remove the mask, but like before, like the worst day of her life, and in a poor of black smoke, he was gone.

“So, you’re not going to kill me then?!” She cried up to the emptiness. “I deserve it! What have I done to you?! Gabriel...Reaper...whoever you are! What have I...”

She looked down at the gravestone. “What have I done?” She touched the writing and began to cry, softly. “I’m so sorry...”

After a moment, she felt arms around her from behind, and the strange sensation of lips on her cheek, the skin rough, scarred, thin like decay, but so familiar. Then, it was gone. And Angela Ziegler stood, looking up at the sky again, eyes still wet but her face firm and full of strength. “I love you. And if it takes the rest of my life, I’ll fix this.” And with that, she placed the roses down and left, to return to her work, to her missions and with a new sense of strength and purpose.

Her pistol is dwarfed in comparison to his shotguns, but Angela stands her ground, unmoving, not daring to show her back to the Reaper standing before her. Her team is a good distance away, searching for her but she cannot allow them to see this. They can’t know that he is here.

“Tell me something, doc,” his voice is sudden, causing her to involuntarily tense, her fingers clenching tighter around her blaster. “Do you really have what it takes to pull the trigger on that little toy of yours?” 

A deep breath. He’s trying to call her out on a bluff and her eyes narrow. “If it means protecting the lives of the innocent I-” her words cut short as a steel talon closes around the muzzle of the blaster and pulls it against a broad chest. When did he...? Blue eyes linger on his hand for a moment before returning to the mask. 

“...I-I will protect them!” she tries again.

“There are no innocents here,” Reaper hisses, and Angela swears she can feel his breath on her hands, despite the gloves she wears. “Just us. And we both know...you are far from innocent.”

Eyes widening, Angela’s fingers slack on the blaster, the small gun clattering to the ground in what little space is between them. 

She remembers. She remembers.

Smoke and ash fill her nostrils and she gags, her hand seeking a wall to support herself, her VSRS suit’s wings just barely hanging on by a few loose wires that sizzle and spark angrily. It doesn’t matter, the nano-machines are already healing her, slowly, but she’s healing. What matters is that she must get back to her team. 

She’d been tricked, her compassion being her own undoing when she broke of from them because she heard calls for help. Reyes had told her, had warned her to stay with the team, but she couldn’t ignore such a helpless cry. She had waited for them to round the corner, her fingers clutching her staff tightly as the last one, McCree, left. He had wanted to stick around but she told him that she needed to give her staff a little tune-up (a bold-faced lie) and that she’d just be a minute, don’t worry.

And she had run. She’ll deal with the consequences later, someone needed her help. Angela followed the voice through a maze of alleys until finally, finally!, she sees the victim. A young woman, no older than she is, clutching at something, protecting something (a child?) and she doesn’t hesitate to move towards her, her hand already extending itself out to help her.

“-----” the woman says something inaudible, and she looks so guilty as she looks up at her, tears streaming down her face. 

“Mercy is here, let me help you.” Angela smiles so sweetly, trying not to scare the woman. 

She didn’t notice that she had been followed by two grungy looking men, all tattoos and muscles, leering at her. All she sees is a helpless woman trying to keep her child safe.

This is when they strike. A metal club bashes against her wings, taking most of the blow but it has enough force to drive Angela to her knees, the hand that held the staff letting it go. It clatters on the ground, a few inches away from her and when she reaches for it, a dirty boot kicks it away.

“A little angel out here, how nice of you to drop by.”

The memory gets hazy after that, she remembers pretending to comply to their orders before she pulls out the blaster that had been given to her only weeks earlier. 

A cute little peashooter as Torbjorn had called it, laughter in his eyes.

Then she’s back at headquarters, the front of her uniform dyed red, her blaster empty of plasma bullets. All twenty of them. Jack tells her later that McCree is the one who found her, screaming bloody murder as she gunned her assailants down, that the woman had managed to get away safely. 

She remembers spending many restless nights tossing in bed, seeing those men in her nightmares calling her a murderer.

Sobbing into her coffee in the mornings that come after, until Reyes, fed up with her declining performance, comes and sits her down, to talk about it. He tells her that it couldn’t have been avoided, that if she hadn’t done what she had, there would be two less good people in the world. She had saved that woman’s life and her child. Two for two. Equivalent exchange.

“It...It couldn’t be avoided!” she repeats Reyes’ words to the Reaper, her hands balled up into fists. “Two lives were traded, I saved two people!”

Reaper doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word. It’s like he’s processing her words before he shakes his head and lowers his shotguns. “But you’re still not innocent, are you?”

Seething, Angela unclenches her hands and glares. How dare he put words in her mouth, how dare he assume-! “No, I never said I was. I killed those men. I ha-”

“And you call yourself Mercy. Perhaps Devil suits you better.” There’s a gravelly laugh and his guns seem to vanish. She says nothing, biting her cheek, “Does that upset you?”

“No.” She had chosen her call name, not because she thought herself an angel of mercy, but because that’s what she always had to offer to those she saved. Mercy and compassion. “It’s just a name.”

“Huh, your spine has grown, I see.” The bone-mask tilts to the side as if he’s recalling something, what that might be she has no idea, she doesn’t even know who it is behind that mask. She only knows him as the Reaper, someone who’s been hunting down the last remnants of Overwatch. “Go-”

-She interrupts him, “What do you want?”

- and he l a u g h s, raspy and rough as if he hadn’t for a long time. “Ziegler, don’t spoil my fun. This is-” clawed hands reached for her arm, grasping it and pulling her close. “-our fated reunion.”

Reunion?

“So you can’t even recognize your own creations?”

What is this?

The pressure on her wrist grows tighter, and she’s being pulled up, face nearly pressed against that mask. “You don’t recognize me?” And then the mask is pulled off, revealing a ghost she had buried, had cried over, had mourned.

A gasp leaves her mouth, and the Reaper drops her, replacing the mask and cracking his neck.

“H...How did you? I...I buried you!” she all but screams, a familiar sting pricking at her eyes and her vision begins to swim with tears.

“Buried me...” he repeats and raises a gun to tap against his shoulder. “In a way perhaps. That man is dead.”

“Gab-”

“Reaper.” He cuts her off before she can finish calling his name, and she feels his eyes burning into her, into her soul. “That man. Is. Dead.” He snarls, before the edges of his coat start smoking and she watches as he quite literally begins to dissipate into smoke, as if he truly was a ghost.

He reappears behind her, gun pressed against her back. “I really do hate to cut things short, Angela, but orders are orders.” 

The click of the gun has her tensing, has her closing her eyes, a silent apology to Winston that she won’t be coming back tonight. But the final blow never comes. 

Angela opens her eyes and finds that she is alone. No shadows, no Reaper, no Gabriel. Her heart is thumping hard inside her chest and she gasps for air, nearly chokes on it as she greedily gulps it down. 

Why...how did she create him? Her resurrection...it had failed! Failed her, failed him and...and...she couldn’t understand anymore. 

A creation coming back to destroy its creator.

Frankenstein had been one of her favorite books once.