Moira x Gabriel Rey's aka reaper

Part 3

He learned to enjoy rats.

What was left of Gabriel Reyes longed for a war that would end him. He knew he was a failed half-step to the future; he knew that hunger, pain, injury, death, would not end him. Nothing would, short of nuclear apocalypse, and even that was just an educated guess.

And nothing sated the hunger.

Sitting in the hull of the drop ship, with the doors open, he waited. It looked like shelter to anything unwary; it (his body, him) smelled good (goooooood) to the corpse-eaters and the bottom feeders. Once, more than once, a wolf or a bear came across his path hesitantly, spotting the ravens and the carrion birds circling above.

Those were the best times. They put up more of a fight.

He held the fort, waiting for the others to arrive. Either he or Widowmaker were ideal for the job; they could shut down for days, weeks at a time. Immobile and immortal, like something crocodilian that hadn't changed for millions of years, merely became perfect versions of themselves.

Sitting with the cargo door open, he waited in the freezing cold. For days. A common brown rat found the lure of shelter irresistible. The rat sniffed his hand curiously, took a bite, found his corpse unpalatable, and then left him alone for the remainder of his stay.

When Sombra returned to the ship in shivering layers of fur and leather, she climbed in, kicked the old engine to life, and turned on the heat.

"You good, jefe?" Sombra said over the comm system.

He rattled to life, a shuddering clatter of bone and meat. Ink poured into him, making him solid, and Gabriel slowly rose to his feet. In the darkness he heard the hum of electricity, and two heartbeats. Sombra in the cockpit and the little brown rat, nestled somewhere dark and warm.

One for the road.

Gabriel looked up at the speaker. "Yes."

"I always wonder if you're gonna wake up, every time you do that."

"Tell me where Lacroix is," he said instead of responding to that.

"We had to split up in St. Petersburg." Sombra hissed something angrily in Spanish that he only half-understood. "We got the job done, though. Petrikov ain't gonna bother us no more. We headed to Venice next?"

"No," he said. "Oasis."

Sombra cheered up at the thought of warmth, and desert. A jewel of a city. "Nice! What for?"

There was no pleasure in hunting when he knew precisely where his prey was. But Gabriel stalked nonetheless, stopping right in front of the seat where the rat was hiding. The plane took off with a shudder of engine and belching fire, humming up into the air and flying away.

He lunged forward with one hand. Slinking through the crevices, his hand reformed as a claw, snagging the rat right by its tail. The thing screamed as he dragged it out, let it dangle in the air. Even with the power on, the ship was still so cold that every bleeding scrape on the animal steamed with heat. Billowing like a forge, all of it surging towards him.

He made a fist, crushing the small body until blood dripped down his arm. Every inch of him soaked it up, trembling, his chest lurching heavily with staggered breaths.

I will make a war, he thought, and people always say their conflict will be the one to end all wars, but mine will be the one to change all wars, to change all of humanity, to make us stronger, what we could be instead of what we are, to make us perfect.

When Gabriel opened his fist there was nothing except dried flesh in his hand, mummified and tattered leather. The bones turned into dust, draining down between the gaps in his fingers.