He knew she'd find him.

He hasn't exactly made himself scarce these past few weeks, and she always had a habit of knowing more than she ought. He knew it was really only a matter of time before Overwatch's angel decided to darken his doorstep.

So Reaper is decidedly unsurprised when he hears the telltale click of her heels as she descends the stairs—the light from her wings illuminating the dark room with a soft, warm glow.

He stands against the wall, waiting. He's already stowed away anything he doesn't want her to see and all that remains are old maps and charts tacked to the concrete walls. He isn't concerned in the slightest—even if she had a motive and the tools to back it up, she'd never qualify as a threat—and so he simply waits.

Mercy is not one for arbitrary actions. She has sought him out for a reason, and he intends to find out what that reason is.

She finds the switch on the wall and flips it. Even in the harshness of artificial lights, standing in the middle of a decrepit, dilapidated basement, surrounded by old plans to level entire cities, she looks ethereal—some kind of otherworldly creature that radiates elegance and grace and compassion.

They stare at each other.

"Gabriel," she greets him quietly. Her accent turns his name into music.

"Doctor," he replies, his voice a low hiss. "A pleasure, of course."

She frowns slightly, but ultimately ignores him, choosing instead to step away from the staircase and draw nearer.

"You haven't drawn your weapons yet," she notes, lifting a brow. "Does that mean you're willing to listen?"

He shrugs, tracking her movements behind his mask. "It means I haven't found the motivation to put a bullet in your brain," he replies flippantly. "Just hang around, I'm sure I'll get there."

Mercy shakes her head, the action causing the light to catch her halo-shaped headpiece. She turns away from him then, letting her gaze play across the rest of the room.

"I hear you have a partner now," she remarks, heels clicking against the cracked cement as she walks calmly across the room, staff held slack at her side. She pauses to examine a yellowing map of St. Petersburg that clings to the wall. "Reaper and Widowmaker," she muses, tossing a cursory glance over her shoulder to see him standing across the room, watching her closely.

"What about it?" he asks bluntly.

She shrugs, pursing her lips. "Nothing really, I suppose. It is, how do they say, très poétique."

His mask hides any expression he might have pulled, but Mercy knows he's scowling at her.

"A little dark for you, Doctor," he remarks, his voice a low rumble in his chest. "Don't tell me all this war's finally made you hard."

Mercy scoffs under her breath, rolling her eyes as she turns to face him.

"I cannot make a simple comment on the poetic irony of an alliance between two macabrely named operatives without being accused of losing my softness?" She arches a golden eyebrow. "Hypocrisy doesn't suit you, Gabriel."

He snorts from within his mask, finally shrugging away from the wall. Mercy's slender fingers tighten reflexively on her staff at his movements, but they relax a moment later. She boldly meets his gaze as he strides across the room towards her.

"Lot of fancy words there," he drawls. "Give me the simple version."

She treats him to an unimpressed look. "You possess one of the sharpest tactical minds in the world," she tells him archly. "Forgive me for doubting such needs."

"Maybe at one time," he counters lowly. "That's the thing about being brought back from the dead—you don't have much time to collect the important stuff. Like brain cells. Or a heart."

He receives a dark look for his taunts, but she still retains her poise as she moves about the room. Not many people have the daring to turn their back on the Reaper—he'll give her that, at least.

"It was a one time thing," he says, and she can feel his gaze weighing against her back as she moves to inspect more charts on the wall. "We tried to steal Doomfist's gauntlet."

Mercy nods, eyes narrowing as she scans the graph before her, trying to make sense of the numbers and figures. "Yes, I heard about that. You were stopped by a child, if I recall."

His temper simmers as she glances over her shoulder, smiling lightly at him. "I'm only joking. There's no need to look so sullen."

"I'm wearing a mask," he growls, voice low and threatening. "I don't look like anything."

"You cannot put a mask over human nature," she tells him softly. "You are not a ghost, much as you might like to think you are."

Silence settles over the room as they stare at each other. There are so many things to say, but they just stand there, drowning in the silence.

"There is no trick, old friend," Mercy tells him quietly, after the silence has gone on long enough. She spreads her arms in a show of placidity. "No ambush, no backup, no one waiting in the wings." She drops her hands, offering a small shrug. "It is only me."

"Only you," he repeats, and his dark, dour tone drips doubt. "In a Valkyrie suit."

Mercy allows this with a small nod, giving the wings on her back a gentle flutter. "It's better than walking," she answers honestly. "And you picked a particularly hostile area to set up shop in, though I imagine that's by design."

"Why seek me out?" he asks lowly, ignoring her commentary. "Think of some new experiments you want to try?"

Her expression darkens—warm features twisting with dislike.

"Don't, Gabriel," she warns him softly. "I did not come here to fight."

He barks a laugh then, the sound rattling out from behind his mask.

"It wouldn't be much of a fight," he tells her. "You weren't picked for Overwatch because of your sharpshooting."

She graces him with a look of sharp displeasure. "I am a doctor," she replies, a cool bite of anger to her words. "I have never prided myself on my sharpshooting."

"Bringing people back from the dead, though," he remarks, watching her closely for a reaction as he baits Overwatch's angel. "Is that something you pride yourself on?"

The resulting silence lasts only a second. Then her footfalls echo in the basement as she strides towards him, face laced tight with anger. Behind his mask, Reaper smirks.

Mercy inserts herself directly into his space, fearlessly glaring up into the mask of Reaper. "I will not have my honor as a doctor questioned by a man who takes orders from the highest bidder." Her words are low and fierce and they burn. She clutches her staff tightly in one hand, the other raised to point a gloved finger where is face would be if not for his mask.

"Step away from me," he orders lowly.

"I am not finished," she argues, her voice a harsh whisper.

There's a nearly inaudible whisper of leather-on-steel as Reaper smoothly draws a shotgun, aiming it directly at her, point-blank range.

She stares straight past it, undaunted.

"I have faced worse threats than you," she informs him coolly. "You do not scare me, Gabriel."

He sneers at her, pushing the muzzle of his gun under her chin, forcing her head back further. She gazes up at him evenly, fury smoldering in her eyes.

"Worse threats, huh?" he asks, twisting his tone as sharply as he can until he's practically spitting expletives at her. "Like what?"

Her eyes would scar him if not for his mask.

"I could describe the barrel of John Morrison's rifle to you in perfect clarity," she hisses. "Would that suffice?"

Reaper's heart cuts all ties with his chest and leaps into his throat.

"He attacked you?" The words are out of his mouth—heavy with concern and fear and disbelief and a thousand things he hasn't given voice to in years. He drops the shotgun, and it goes clattering away as he steps away from her swiftly, trench coat flaring under his movements as his eyes rake her profile, searching for some sort of wound he must have missed. No one escapes a firefight with 76 unscathed. Especially not someone like Mercy.

She stares him down, and there's something in her expression that takes him back to the first time he'd met the good doctor—when she was Doctor Angela Ziegler and he was Commander Gabriel Reyes. Morrison had been the one to introduce the two before she excused herself to go check on her patients.

He'd scoffed the moment she stepped out of earshot. "You can't be serious, Jack. A doctor? Does she even know how to shoot?"

The man who would become his most hated rival lifted an eyebrow.

"Don't judge her too quickly, Gabe. She's not a fighter, but she's got a sense of duty stronger than most soldiers I've met."

Reaper meets her gaze, wondering if he'd be bold enough to do so without his mask. He doesn't care for religion, but he knows a thing or two about the Angel of Death.

"I attacked him."

The world goes vertigo—pushing and pulling him at the same time. Reaper can only stare.

A thousand questions threaten to spill from his mouth, but he grants passage to only one: "Why?"

Mercy eyes him a moment longer looking away, gazing at the wall opposite them. Reaper wonders what she sees as her clear blue eyes trace the documents tacked up. Old maps don't leave people with haunted looks in their eyes.

"It was after the…internal skirmish," she explains, and he'd snort at her delicate wording of the Overwatch civil war he'd kick-started if he could find his voice. "You were…well, you'd been better, honestly."

"We were caught in the explosion," he prompts her darkly. "Morrison and I. We died."

Mercy won't look at him, and he's not sure why the sudden lack of eye contact is bothering him as much as it is.

"Yes. Well, officially, that is." A pause. "But neither of you truly died. Obviously. You were brought to me by McCree."

Reaper's eyes narrow behind his mask. He knows how this story ends—Mercy's medical experiments giving way to his sorry existence—but he'd never concerned himself with the details. He now finds himself enraptured.

"So there you were—on my table, flatlining—and I was trying everything I could do and a lot of things I knew I really couldn't do to just get you breathing again…" she trails off, swallowing hard. Regret shines in her eyes, but she soldiers on with her story, refusing to face him.

"That's when John came to me."

Reapers goes stiff at her words, a hot wrath blazing up in his heart.

"He went undetected for years," Reaper argues. "They buried him for god's sake. And you expect me to believe he just waltzed up to your operation table?"

"He wasn't waltzing," Mercy snaps, finally glancing back to glare at him. "He could hardly stand. But he still had a gun, and even half-dead as he was, he was positively lethal." She sighs, dropping her gaze once more. "So we just stood there in the infirmary. You had one foot in the grave, and John wanted to make sure that other foot followed suit."

"He wanted to kill me." It sounds so stupidly obvious when he says it aloud. Of course 76 wanted to kill him. Everyone wanted to kill him.

"He did," Mercy agrees softly. Her eyes go unfocused and sightless, and he knows she's there again—back in her operating room, table occupied by something teetering between man and corpse, held at gunpoint by the most feared solider in the world. Reaper wonders if she'd been afraid.

He finds his answer when she lifts her eyes—clear blue gaze cutting him to the quick.

"I did not let him." Her voice is like hot ashes and cracking glaciers. It burns from the inside out, inciting a bitterly cold fire.

Reaper can only stare.

"You were my patient, Gabriel," she tells him, and her voice has softened slightly—less like the voice of god and more like the voice of an angel. "I would have died before I let him take you—before I let anyone take you." She draws a steadying breath, and Reaper notes she holds her staff in a white-knuckle grip.

"I am not going to ask you to come back to us. My pride will not allow me to beg, and your pride will not allow you to accept." Her eyes shine in the artificial lighting—overbright and wild. "But know this, Gabriel: if you try and harm any operative, if you mark yourself as an enemy of Overwatch, you will find no sympathy from me."

He cocks an eyebrow behind his mask, trying to recover his callous indifference. "You act like you'll be alive to have the option."

"I will be," she tells him, and her words ring with sincerity. "You won't kill me, Gabriel. And I won't kill you. We have not left ourselves a great many options."

Her words tempt him to draw his shotguns again—to truly test her supposed mettle—but he abstains.

"I'd kill you in a heartbeat," he growls. But there isn't enough venom and spite in the world to make him believe his own lie.

Mercy just turns her back on him—his eyes flit between three different killshots she bares to him in the process—and strides across the room, away from him.

"You will not kill me," she repeats, nearing the stairs. "As you have learned, perhaps a bit too well, there are things so much worse than death." She mounts the stairs, pausing to look back at him. Her expression could have been carved from stone. "You hate me too much to grant me a simple death."

He stares back at her, thankful his makes hides his face. He doesn't even know what expression he's pulled in response to her words.

"And why won't you kill me?" he asks her roughly, the question out of his mouth before he can think better of it.

She pauses, stilling her movements as she looks back down at him.

"The same reason I won't let anyone else kill you," she answers evenly. "You're my patient, Gabriel. You have my protection. You will always have my protection."

She leaves then. Overwatch's angel, off to save another lucky soul. Reaper stares at the spot where she'd been for an eternity, standing in alone in what is suddenly a too-bright, too-empty room. He is drawn back to their first meeting, his conversation with the man who would become Soldier 76.

"Sense of duty?" he'd repeated doubtfully. "That's never saved anyone, Jack. It never has. I know plenty of men with duty, and they're all six feet under at Arlington."

"Duty's a strange thing, Gabe," his old friend had replied. "It's like adrenaline, in a way. Makes people move faster, fight harder, love deeper…" he trails off. "She's a doctor, and yet she's essentially enlisting herself for the sake of saving lives. Duty is driving her to enter a warzone."

He'd only scoffed at the speech. "Fine. I don't care. She got a codename? Or are we all just supposed to call her Doctor?"

"Mercy," Jack said. "She wants to be called Mercy."

"Mercy," Reaper murmurs, the name swallowed by his mask. A name and a plea and a promise all wrapped up in a pair of wings. "Mercy."

Wowwwwweeeeee am I Overwatch trash or what?

This game hasn't even fucking come out yet but fuck it. I'm so obsessed with these two it's not even funny.

Their backstory is pretty vague so far, but what people have managed to gather from their respective backstories and in-game dialogue, Mercy is the one who brought Reaper back and essentially made him the way he is. The comment about getting beaten by a child over stealing the gauntlet is from one of the animated shorts, if you haven't watched it.

I don't really know what to say. I've never written anything so blindly before. I just kinda went with my gut. If you guys like it, I'll write more.